LEARN to eat better thanks to an app on your phone and a sensor on your arm. This is the promise of some American health companies, which have devised technological devices (very similar to those used by diabetics for continuous glucose monitoring) for healthy people who want to find out how their body reacts to meals.
Sensors detect i blood glucose levels 24 hours a day and transmit the data to the mobile phone, allowing those who use them to discover in real time how foods change blood sugar levels and, through trials and attempts, to make more balanced food choices. The idea that healthy people constantly monitor their blood sugar with CGMs, the “continuous glucose monitor”Invented years ago for the management of diabetes, it represents a novelty, but it is in line with the growing attention to the theme of personalized nutrition.
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“Now we can no longer think only in terms of calories and standardized dietary patterns because we know that every time we eat the composition of our blood changes and each of us reacts differently to food” he explains Pier Luigi Rossi, Professor of Nutritional Science at the University of Bologna and creator of the molecular method, a diet based precisely on glycemic control to improve one’s health. “The overtaking of calories has not yet been completed, but international scientific research is increasingly studying the body’s reactions to nutrients. We experts know that individual factors such as genetics, gut flora and lifestyle influence how we respond to food. So a device that monitors blood sugar and helps to identify foods that increase it excessively can certainly increase awareness and knowledge about one’s state of health ”.
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Glycemia, that is the blood concentration of glucose (sugar), is in fact the parameter that changes the most after eating and that determines an increase in insulin. “The more the blood sugar rises, the more insulin rises to bring the blood back to normal levels – he continues Rossi – even if the diet must be personalized, there is a universal advice to keep post-prandial blood sugar under control: each main dish should be preceded by raw vegetables and followed by cooked vegetables. The first facilitates digestion because it is rich in fiber which forms a barrier on the intestinal wall by limiting the absorption of glucose; the second is essential for the metabolism of fat cells ”.
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A study published in Plos Biology in 2018 and conducted with CGM on a sample of 57 adults showed frequent and unhealthy blood sugar spikes in many of the healthy participants, branding them as alarm bells for the development of type 2 diabetes and other chronic inflammatory diseases. “We know with certainty that blood sugar spikes are harmful,” he confirms Simona Frontoni, expert of the Italian Society of Diabetology and director of the Endocrinology and Diabetology Unit, Fatebenefratelli Isola Tiberina hospital in Rome. “A few years ago we published on the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism a work on cerebrovascular reactivity, that is, on the ability of our brain to respond to certain stimuli. Good cerebrovascular reactivity is a symptom of a healthy cerebral endothelium, therefore of clean and healthy blood vessels. By experimentally inducing a glycemic peak in non-diabetic subjects, we have seen that even a single variation in blood glucose can negatively alter cerebrovascular reactivity in a healthy patient making it equal to that of a diabetic ”.
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According to the expert, the use of monitoring devices in healthy populations could change the lifestyle of many and help doctors make early diagnoses. “Today the type 2 diabetes it is identified in advanced stages – he underlines Frontoni – and this partly depends on the fact that fasting glycaemia is considered as the only parameter for diagnosis, when it is not. Even if fasting blood sugar is normal, in fact, there may already be changes in glycemic levels, for example after meals. The use of sensors that detect blood glucose among healthy people, therefore, could help us to identify precisely these daily fluctuations, not evident in subjects who may already be pre-diabetic “.
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Ma CGMs could also help you lose weight. For the molecular diet conceived by the nutritionist Rossi weight loss can be achieved when the blood sugar level after lunch does not exceed 130 mg / 100 ml within one hour. Estimating glycemic levels that define a healthy lifestyle, however, is not that simple. “To understand if a diabetic is controlling the disease well, we consider the time-in-range parameter, ie how many times in a day, comparing all the data, his blood sugar is considered correct. If the use of CGM spread among healthy people, we could define parameters of this type for them too. In a diabetic, a glycaemia is considered to be well controlled and after two hours from a meal it does not exceed 160 mg / 100 ml; therefore, trying to translate the data, for a healthy person an acceptable figure could be below 160 mg / 100 ml or even lower ”.
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