Posted by zdw 6/30/2025
I've personally found my CGM to be really useful in understanding the effect of diet, sleep, stress, etc. on my blood glucose, like the OP says, but you definitely get some weird readings sometimes. Yesterday a new unit told me that my blood glucose dropped below 70 for 2 hours. It definitely didn't! After a while it got itself straightened out in time to scold me for eating some corn chips.
With the CGM there is also an additional delay of about 15 minutes in the measurements. Mostly you want to be triggered when something strange happens and then you do a manual measurement to confirm.
A false alarm of low blood sugar is annoying, but it is a lot better than collapsing. You can relax a lot more if you know you will get an alarm.
In the end though- it's still a bit of fungal extract painted onto an electrode, and an ADC that reads the value every so often. Like any other glucose monitor.
what backs this factoid?
Croissants and muffins being unhealthy should be no surprise. I am more interested in findings like food that gets a bad rap being not that unhealthy and supposedly healthy food being bad.
People also refuse to understand that juice is basically sugar water with some extra flavor, vitamins, and antioxidants that don't change how unhealthy it is for you.
White rice is basically pure carbs with barely any nutrients.
Fastfood is heavily processed but often contains enough vegetables, meat, etc to not be that bad all things told.
You should fact check your intuitions about nutrition on cronometer.com.
2 cups of cooked white rice have 17% of the days nutrients for 20% (400) of the calories (2000cal/day). 47% of the day's iron, 33% of the day's folate. 20-30% of almost every B-vitamin. 25% copper, 65% manganese, 43% selenium, 14% of the day's zinc.
Also look at 500g of boiled potato. Someone in this thread called it pure carbs. Ok, pure carbs that give you 27% of the day's nutrients for just 18% of the day's calories? That's a great deal.
I am reasonably sure carbohydrates are nutrients.
Someone chime in with what they think these might be! Should I be eating less broccoli?
It doesn't taste like it contains a lot of sugars, at least not as sweet as other desserts like a cake. But two rolls (weight wise, very small amount) would send my glucose to sky high.
Anyone know what ever happened to those?
what are you guys learning about your super special non diabetic bodies that you can't learn with a $5 book of glycemic indices or a casual afternoon reading basic diabetes dieting advice?
TL;DR:
As a healthy, non-diabetic adult I wore a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to measure my blood sugar for two weeks
The sensor was convenient to use and painless to apply, and was barely noticeable during the two weeks it was on my arm.
In analyzing my blood sugar levels, I learned a lot about my body’s response to different foods and exercise; I could identify some foods that spike my glucose.
Two weeks is too short to make detailed improvements to my nutrition in order to stabilise glucose levels — further monitor and experimentation will be needed.
Dexcom Stelo is probably the easiest to get a hold of, and the one talked about in the article too.