Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM)

“the foods that I loved. Why do you think this is so useful? For the reason that you just described, and that is we're talking about a continuous glucose monitor. So I don't know if there's really one in here, but this is... There probably is. Yeah. It's personalized medicine.”

“But, you know, and I'm not saying you need to wear a CGM at all times, but I think it's extremely valuable and now available without a prescription. There was a big pushback in America about making CGMs, continuous glucose monitors available to people without a prescription.”

“it's useless. I mean, I'll give you a clue, but we can do so much better. A few things that I've discovered from looking at my own continuous glucose monitor that surprised me, and things that I liked, but I am now, you know, I'm a little bit more conscious of. One of them is barbecue sauce, which I loved.”

“I mean, it was, I did everything. I was taking so many supplements. The CGMs. I did CGMs. Yeah. And for me, you know, I was living abroad, so it made a lot of sense. And another thing, and I will say drops in the bucket, it was a perfect storm for me. You know, the parasites was a huge contributing factor.”

“duration and quality of your sleep. Very important. What is your blood sugar doing? Wear a CGM continuous glucose monitor from time to time. Get your blood work done. You know, you could do that without a doctor now and get that information. Then you challenge yourself with the question: well, what do I do with this information?”

“You could have too much saturated fat too, but too much glucose. And then too much glucose, you could catch that by doing a CGM, right? So that's one way you could do it, a continuous glucose monitor. You could then see if you have particularly glucose spikes to certain foods. And if your glucose is shooting up to 200 with certain meals, you know you're sensitive to that.”

“Okay. We have to look at other things getting back to metabolic syndrome ideas. So first you could check for glucose. So glucose spikes. A CGM can do that. I wouldn't say wear it all the time. Get one for a month or two. Learn what spikes your glucose. See if something spikes your glucose and adjust it. Next, you have fasting insulin.”

“Again, that's functionhealth.com/slash Huberman. It's gratifying to hear that you put the CGM pretty early on that list, very early, in fact. I mean, I don't, I want to be clear, I'm neither complaining about nor am I trying to turn you against your colleagues.”

“So I get it on the one hand why a lot of physicians are worried about people walking around with a lot of data. I heard the same about CGMs. Okay, I'm going to try not to rant here. It was like, oh, gosh, who needs to know that glucose goes up, glucose comes down. In the absence of diabetes or pre-diabetes, like you can have a glucose spike.”

“But now that CGMs have been out for a couple of years, I don't hear much pushback. Yeah, if somebody wants to use CGM for a couple of weeks and see how they react to different foods, post-exercise, post-poor sleep, et cetera, cool. So it's kind of wild to me that physicians don't want patients to have data.”

“We had access to fasting insulin, right? But think about this. So say you don't get the CGM and you have fasting insulin, right? And the fasting insulin is normal. You don't know if a step before that is a problem and they're going to have problems with fasting insulin. Or if it's abnormal, you need the CGM to learn how to eat, right?”

“You're spiking your insulin, or you got to figure out why you're spiking it, right? So then you go back to the CGM and you learn, and I don't have any stock in a CGM company either. You got to learn how to eat to not spike your insulin in that case. Now, if you're taking a bunch of saturated fat, that's not great either.”

“for them. I'm going to, you know, put their Apo B through the roof. And they'll think it's okay because it's not showing up on their CGM. I think it's not giving the patients enough credit because generally, if you're getting a CGM, you probably are trying to do the right thing. So I think it's how are they using information?”

“things rather than a biopsy and something that would increase risk. Okay, well, thank you. I was asking you to take my side in the argument, but since you threw out CGMs first, I just kind of took that as an opportunity. I think my, I won't name names, but let me put it this way: whenever I get that sort of pushback, I'll”

“And almost inevitably, they say the same thing. Give it 20 months. This will be standard. And that happened with CGMs. No one bulks at the idea of a CGM. Yeah, you want to put that thing on? You can afford it. You want to get some data. Like most people, most physicians I know now are comfy, but at the beginning, it was like all the pushback in the world.”

“It's just I don't want to blame it for everything. Right, right. I get it. I think that the, you know, earlier we were talking about CGMs and there's sort of a kind of a common theme here, which is the general public now, because of online health information, good and bad, is starting to create their own nomenclature.”

“So I always notice the effect. And anybody who's ever worn a CGM will tell you that if they have a horrible night of sleep, their glucose tolerance goes out the window. And so too does your blood pressure response. So if you look at either very long or very short sleep, you're going to see in all cases an increase in hypertension.”

“Yeah, yeah. And we live indoors and we don't get enough of it from LEDs. Okay, glucose monitors. Love them. They're really good. Yeah, I think that we should all be empowered by our own data. Anyone who says, I don't want to know about my biology, I think I don't agree with that.”

“The CGMs have been very useful personally. I can see how I can see how I react to foods and I was surprised. Um grapes send me through the roof, white rice through the roof. I remember the great thing.”

“I'm wearing one right now. I wear them fairly regularly. The other thing that surprised me about CGMs was I gave one to my son, who at the time was, I think, 17. And we had a competition who can have the best blood glucose levels.”

“Now, I'm not saying go give it to children, but I do think there's an education and a behavioral change that can come with CGMs that, as I think you mentioned earlier today, can really, really make a difference. Therapy. You mean just general psychotherapy? Psychotherapy, psychotherapy.”

“In fact, I'm trying to think of all the times I wore a continuous glucose monitor if I ever saw a blood glucose lever that would have been north of about 160 milligrams per deciliter.”

“in the blood is driving those theca cells in the ovaries to overproduce testosterone. Are you a phenotype? Are you a fan of continuous glucose monitors? The hugest, most gigantic fan of CGMs. I've never seen any tool that I've ever used in medicine change behavior the way that CGMs do. Like I think really understanding what the mediators are of your glucose control is essential.”

“glucose monitor. I'm not diabetic, you know, but I want to see every minute or every five minutes what my sugar levels are in a continuum. Or if I eat something, you know, is it spiking? Is it coming down?”

“10 of them, 20 of them, only if we get sick, not even for a checkup. So, we have to have a continuous, like a glucose monitor. I want to see what my, you know, proteins are changing, hormones are changing, you know, in a reasonably continuous manner.”

“I would never recommend any, I have to just give them the knowledge. Then the person has to make the decision themselves. Do you think it could be beneficial if you were king to have everybody wear a CGM, one of those continuous glucose monitors at least once? No. Never. No, I think if you have cancer and you really want to stay in this green zone to know, right?”

“taken one time per year, like, every single year. Like, what does that really mean? But now that we have access to CGMs and technology like that, I think you could actually, you would actually see it in that data. Right. Especially, well, you know, and we don't really have any good biomarkers for mitochondrial health.”

“Yeah. In fact, they're not measuring insulin, but glucose. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So to answer the question very directly, I'm an enormous advocate of CGM use. The more we democratize access to CGMs, I think the better we put individuals in a position to be their own coach.”

“They don't need to have someone like you berating them and telling them to change their habits and eat a little better. When you see how your body's responding to what you're eating and the CGM enables that, you end up making your own lifestyle changes. So with the use of the CGM, fasting glucose isn't going to be the best indicator.”

“aren't back down to normal by about two hours, that suggests a problem. So in my mind, the greatest utility of the CGM is to monitor the dynamic changes rather than the static, where am I at every morning? That has less value. The dynamic changes are what has value.”

“In fact, people wearing CGMs may notice this, that the CGM may reveal that they're starting to get a cold or a flu because they notice that their glucose levels, they're having a much harder time controlling them, even though their habits haven't changed.”

“Yes. Well, everything you just said, I am nodding to because I can relate. Where I, when I've worn CGMs, I absolutely see that the single most predictive variable of my glycemia in any given day is how did I sleep? Nothing that I've played around with, nothing has even come close.”