Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are a standard tool for people with diabetes. But as part of a recent wellness trend, people with no sign of the disease have been using the devices and sharing their results and tips from their experiences on TikTok.
Wearing a CGM gives people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes a convenient way to check their blood sugar level, says Omodamola Aje, MD, a board-certified endocrinologist at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The device adheres to the skin and collects blood sugar measurements once a minute. But she has noticed more people using glucose monitors when they don’t have diabetes.
Some may be trying to improve their glucose patterns to avoid diabetes. In addition, wellness influencers have promoted CGMs to strengthen mental and physical performance and to motivate healthy behavioral changes like eating healthier foods and exercising more.
“The question of whether people without diabetes should wear a CGM sits right at the intersection of endocrinology and the wellness trend, and the honest answer isn’t simply yes or no,” Dr. Aje says.
If you don’t have diabetes but want to use a glucose monitor, here are some things to consider.
1. It’s Unclear if Tracking Glucose Levels Improves Health
“The data on CGM use in nondiabetic populations is still evolving,” Aje says. “Right now, the evidence [of benefits] is not strong at all.”
For example, a meta-analysis of 23 studies showed that people without diabetes who wore a CGM didn’t experience blood sugar stabilization. This balance is important because if blood sugar is consistently too high, it can negatively impact your pancreas, heart, and arteries, says Maya Feller, RD, the founder and lead dietitian at Maya Feller Nutrition, which is based in New York City (she was not involved in the study).
While some people in the analysis made positive short-term dietary changes when wearing a CGM, the studies didn’t address whether people sustained these changes over the long term.
“In the right patient population — someone with lupus or on steroids — wearing a CGM can help them see how their daily habits impact blood sugar,” Aje says. Lupus and steroids both impact blood sugar, so these people can analyze how their food, medications, and sleeping patterns change their blood sugar, for example, and then start eating healthier foods, she says.
Typically, Aje says, people without diabetes should only wear the device for 10 to 14 days at a time to avoid skin irritation or malfunctions (people with diabetes should also change the device frequently, depending on the brand’s recommendations). A few months later, the person might wear it again for the same length of time. “But for the vast majority, even gestational diabetes patients, there aren’t strong indications to use a CGM,” she says.
2. CGMs Can Lead to Information Overload
If you don’t have diabetes, CGMs can create a mountain of notifications that are hard to interpret.
“CGMs aren’t things we prescribe indiscriminately,” Aje says. A primary care or other physician, dietitian, or endocrinologist should educate you about the device before you use it.
They should also tell you what qualifies as a healthy blood sugar range, says Feller, since not understanding the flood of information you receive can lead to unhealthy behaviors. For example, if you’re concerned that your blood sugar is too low, you might eat sugary snacks you normally wouldn’t eat, Feller says. Or you might starve yourself because you think your blood sugar is too high.
Even if you understand the CGM’s data, you should stop using it if the information becomes more overwhelming than beneficial, Feller says.
3. CGMs Can Be Prone to Errors and Misreadings
CGMs make mistakes, Aje says. A reading “can be 30 to 40 points different from what your real blood sugar is.”
These inaccurate readings can be harmful. People with diabetes who are prescribed a CGM have access to a physician to interpret readings, but when you buy a CGM over the counter, you might get stressed out by erroneous readings, Aje says.
4. Data From CGMs Can Cause Health Anxiety
If you don’t have diabetes, wearing a CGM can worsen health anxiety over a normal response, Aje says.
“If you haven’t eaten in four to five hours, your blood sugar can go down to 65, which is completely normal for a person without diabetes,” she says. “But people can think they’re in a hypoglycemic crisis and then have a candy bar or drink a soda that they don’t need.”
Fixating on CGM readings can also make you worry that you have a disorder or need unwarranted, expensive tests, Aje says. “It’s just a negative spiral.”
Biohackers — people trying to extend their longevity, in this case by keeping their blood sugar as stable as possible — might struggle with that spiral, Feller says. “For folks focused on optimizing to age 110, this can put them into a tizzy.”
This distress has an impact. Research has found that health anxiety is associated with poorer quality of life, particularly for women.
To avoid this, some people just shouldn’t use a CGM, Feller says. If you have a history of eating disorders, hyperfocus on tracking results, or have orthorexia (an obsession with healthy eating and restrictive behaviors), a CGM would be harmful, she says.
5. For the Right Person, a CGM Could Be Helpful
However, some people could benefit from using a CGM for a short amount of time.
For Lauren Chambers, a health and wellness content creator who doesn’t have diabetes, wearing a CGM helped her body adjust following the birth of her first child.
“After I had my first kid, I wanted to avoid bounce-back ideology, but my body was feeling sluggish and not like before,” Chambers says. “So the glucose monitor was a way to learn about what was going on instead of focusing on the scale.”
She consulted her functional medicine doctor before wearing the CGM. For the first few days, she ate whatever she wanted and wrote down what caused blood sugar spikes.
“Then I did research to see, okay, a banana is fine and oatmeal is fine. But I could try pairing them with protein, like Greek yogurt,” she says. After the change, she saw fewer spikes and felt better.
“The tangible evidence for why I was feeling blah was helpful in my new mom life, where feeling blah could be anything,” Chambers says.
Wearing a CGM monitor may also be beneficial if any of the following apply to you, according to Feller.
- You have prediabetes.
- You’re on the border of having prediabetes, and your blood sugar is trending up over time.
- You’re insulin-resistant.
- You’re a middle-aged woman undergoing hormonal changes that make it harder to protect against blood sugar elevation.
- You can think about blood sugar from a metabolic perspective, not a weight perspective. This means focusing on how your body uses food to create energy, not monitoring blood sugar spikes with the sole goal of losing weight.
In these cases, a CGM could lead to useful behavioral changes. “If you consistently run low in blood sugar and want to go for a run, maybe you’ll have a carb-rich snack so that when you move your body, you don’t go even lower,” Feller says.
Or if your blood sugar is higher than normal after a meal, you can go on a walk to move excess sugar from your bloodstream into cells, where they produce energy, she says.
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