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FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

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Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#361

Post by TylerE »

bakedoatmeal wrote: post #320
ijustlovemath wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, diabetes is fundamentally a lack of ability to control your blood sugar. This means you get lots of highs but also lots of lows. It's a common misconception that diabetes just means your blood sugar is always high; rather, your sugar is high because your body no longer controls it actively.

Diabetes mellitus is an insulin problem- either a lack of insulin (Type 1) or insufficient response to insulin (Type 2). Insulin is responsible for lowering blood glucose. The hormones responsible for raising blood glucose (cortisol, IGF-1, glucagon, epinephrine) still function normally. My understanding was hypoglycemia only occurs in diabetes in the presence of medications used to lower blood glucose (insulin formu…

It’s not either or, either. Some really unlucky folks end up with a hybrid and have both problems… they don’t produce enough insulin or react well to what they do.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#362

Post by dhoe »

ps2fats wrote: post #351
dhoe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the Netherlands and just bought a Freestyle Libre 3 from https://www.dia-centrum.nl/ . It didn't require a prescription and was easy to set up and you can get the data out of Freestyle's website, as a CSV download if I remember correctly. I had a doctor comment that he'd never seen anybody wearing one just out of interest, and he was slightly condescending about it.

Perfect, I'm also in the NL and was hoping someone would have more information. I totally believe the GP being condescending about it, they are trained as gatekeepers to medical care to reduce costs to the system (wife is a doctor). It is also unimaginable to them, for whatever reason, that people would pay for things out of pocket.

Haha, yeah, don't get me started. My other recommendations along these lines for people who don't want to argue with their GP about which blood tests "make sense" is https://onedayclinic.nl/. Their pricing is somewhat confusing but you can just email them everything you'd like to measure and they'll make you a (reasonable) offer.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#363

Post by TylerE »

necovek wrote: post #330
mangoman wrote: post #166

I recently had an unusual health event that resulted in me passing out. My wife, who is a physician, thought it might be hypoglycemia, since i'm at high risk for diabetes. She found a super friendly endocrinologist who put me on a CGM for two weeks. I never hit the hypoglycemia range during those two weeks, so it didn't really explain what my issue... but honestly the data was SUPER interesting. Just observing the va…

I personally wouldn't mind having the data if a need comes up, but this is simply overtracking for no particular purpose. Basically, our bodies go through much "turmoil" over the course of any day, and watching over one too many parameters is like getting hooked to TV or a video game. Generally, medical science can mostly tell you what averages or most common patterns are, so if you do not line up with them and don't…

More importantly for life style monitoring A1C is the more important number anyway, and doesn’t require wearing anything, just a simple blood test. It’s basically a 3 month moving average.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#364

Post by TylerE »

colordrops wrote: post #205
jseliger wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I got cancer, I had one through Levels, and it was informative. Dessert is much worse than I'd thought. Rice, too, including brown rice. I remember eating some biryani and a small bit of naan at an Indian restaurant and thinking that I'd been pretty healthy, only to see a spike of like 80.

Is 80 high? That seems totally fine.

80, as an absolute reading, is on the low side of normal. Like, that’s what it might be first thing in the morning before you eat. Anything sub 50 starts to get dicey.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#365

Post by TylerE »

CadmiumYellow wrote: post #204
throwup238 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hunter gatherers would maybe eat some berries here (much smaller and less sweet than modern berries) and there. Archaic humans had access to plenty of wild fruit that were high in sugar and tubers that were high in complex carbs. They even had access to concentrated forms of sugar like sugarcane and honey. They obviously didn't have refined sugars in everything they eat like we do but that they had access to limite…

Not to mention humans 150 years ago who ate plenty of bread and still didn't have the problems we have with obesity and diabetes. Or even 50 years ago...

That’s not really a fair statement. Many problem who would die of diabetes today would have died of something else 200 years ago long before the diabetes got them. Non-juvenile diabetes is a slow killer, it’s really hard for it to kill you before the age of reproduction.

A diagnosis today that is imminently manageable like asthma was far more readily in a world without antibiotics, steroids, or even medical oxygen.

Even something like a CPAP that many of us take for granted has only been readily available for 30 years or so.

Plus, diabetes is much like AIDS in that it’s more of a systemic thing than acute. It doesn’t really have symptoms that kill you. It just slowly weakens your body until your heart gives in, or you have a serious infection, or something like that. No one dies “of” diabetes, they die with it.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#366

Post by watwut »

slily wrote: post #356
watwut wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disordered eating is more dangerous then obesity.

I doubt that's true unless the degree is extreme. Humans evolved with "disordered eating" and fasting is well-researched.

Humans evolved with a lot of behaviors that is or was not healthy. Evolution requires you to have offspring and have them alive until having own offsprings.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#367

Post by agawish »

coldpie wrote: post #3

I'm T1D (insulin-dependent). I used a Dexcom for a couple years a while ago, back around the G3 through G5 era or so. I ended up stopping using it because my diabetes is very well managed, and I found it didn't make a huge difference to my management. With my insurance, each new sensor every week cost about $50, and would fail in various annoying ways: sometimes it would just stop working in the middle of the week, o…

I'm really intrigued by your statement that your diabetes is well managed, if I wake up in the wrong side of the bed, my insulin resistance change!

Wondering how you can maintain that, do you have a very rigid routine and meal plan?

I'm using Libre2 as part of my prescription and it has been working wonders by alerting early on before it is too low or too high to have enough time for a correction dose, or a small bite. The fact that you can see the trajectory of Glucose going up or down is by itself a reason to get.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#368

Post by komposit »

My son was diagnosed with diabetes about 4 weeks ago. The first two weeks we were measuring him through fingersticks multiple times daily. Now we have the cgm it has become so much easier to manage his condition.

The interesting thing to observe is to see in real time the metabolic spectrum of the foods we consume. Liquid sugars cause glucose spikes within 6 minutes. Solid carbs 30-120 minutes depending on carb complexity etc. Proteins 3h+. Fats can be six hours or more.

The thing is there are a variety of insulins available, some of which are rapid acting and others act more slowly. So to keep my son in range with multiple daily injections you are playing this game of giving him the right mix of foods where his carb digestion matches the profile of his rapid acting insulin.

Pizza is an interesting case study. It is by far the most carb rich deal we've tried and it is almost impossible to manage. With so many carbs it's hard to get the insulin dosage right, and once he is high, once he is coming down from that the digestion of the fats kicks in and he remains high through the night.

I think it would be a great thing for people to wear even just for a couple of weeks.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#369

Post by amanaplanacanal »

int_19h wrote: post #328
EasyMark wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

light bread starts turning into sugar almost instantly in the mouth and stomach. It's only one step removed and saliva can break it down quickly because it has amylase. Sour dough and whole wheat/grain breads tend to break down a bit slower. You can freeze bread overnight and make it a bit more "resistant" to breaking down quickly and I pretty much do this with all my breads along with toasting them a bit for sandwic…

Do you mean that they need to be cold when they are consumed, or is it the process of freezing itself that does something, even if it's later reheated?

They don’t need to be cold when consumed.

Re: FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

#370

Post by technological »

aledalgrande wrote: post #345
mangoman wrote: post #166

I recently had an unusual health event that resulted in me passing out. My wife, who is a physician, thought it might be hypoglycemia, since i'm at high risk for diabetes. She found a super friendly endocrinologist who put me on a CGM for two weeks. I never hit the hypoglycemia range during those two weeks, so it didn't really explain what my issue... but honestly the data was SUPER interesting. Just observing the va…

I actually just got one of these CGMs after listening to Peter Attia's (audio)book Outlive and started monitoring my glucose and experimenting with meals and exercise to see what effects they have. Apart from the weirdness of having something attached to your skin, it's like having another watch and you won't notice after a while. It's pretty cool and a lot more people than just diabetics would benefit from this know…

can you post link to the device which you brought
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