Preventive medicine is a bit one. If your fitness watch could measure blood glucose, I think it would be a ton more impactful in terms of health outcomes.

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malfist 5 hours ago | parent [-]

In what way? Nondiabetic folks self regular glucose just fine on their own.

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jimbobimbo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what I thought too, until I got my last bloodwork results and started wearing one of the OTC continuous glucose monitors.

That device helped a lot to switch diet habits.

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robbiep 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you be specific about what your bloodwork results showed and what special insights your CGM gave you and what behavioural changes it led to?

My anecdotal experience from doctor colleagues giving CGM to patients is that it does 3/5ths of fuck all to everyone except those with actual insulin dependent diabetes (T1 or T2) because when you get down to it the insights aren’t that great and most people actually aren’t that invested in shifting the dial on their health that much. But I’m fascinated by examples to the contrary

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RHSeeger 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seeing just how much rice can impact your blood sugar is eye opening. Sticking to a "half the normal amount" of rice when eating Indian/Asian food can help a lot with blood sugar. And keeping blood sugar in check _seems_ to have a fair amount of researching backing up the idea that it's healthier and makes you feel better

	▲	malfist an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure it impacts it. But what does that matter? Your body is very efficient as self regulating

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barryp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For sure it's going to depend on the person, but I bet a lot of the hacker news crowd here appreciates observability and metrics.

In software we're wiring up stuff with prometheus and making grafana dashboards and changing code and configuration based on what we see happening. CGMs in a way give you insight into one aspect of your body and diet.

I've been trying Lingo, and it's been super-interesting to see in almost realtime how your body reacts to different foods. Sure you read all the time about "watch your carbs..." or "don't eat so much sugar", but it's hard to know how seriously to take that advice.

It's a whole different thing though when you eat one thing for a snack and see a big spike in a graph on your phone, and eat a different thing the next day and see hardly any change at all. It makes it much easier to rationalize your food choices.

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sroussey 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I did it for a month and learned what kinds of things led to spikes and what did not and it wasn’t always obvious without the monitor.

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jimbobimbo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My story is: I had a really bad crash after eating a chocolate, which never happened before. That prompted the bloodwork, which shown that A1c was not where it's supposed to be.

I bought CGM myself, without any doctor's input. Didn't know they exist before reading some selfhelp book which my wife found.

Echoing another poster, it's eye opening how some of the foods you'd never think of, are spiking glucose levels.

Overall, after both me and my wife adjusted diet, much better energy through the day, no crashes.

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simmerup 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the same way a step counter encourages people to walk more, a glucose monitor on your watch could discourage you from eating that extra donut

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malfist 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Does a step counter do that? All studies I've seen say they don't cause people to adapt their behavior

	▲	cj 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This study says otherwise: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2007/11/pedometers-he... Even if it doesn’t increase steps on average, it will absolutely still work with someone who’s self-motivated and not just looking for a quick fix.