Dr Casey Means is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Levels Health, a med tech company that provides closed-loop continuous glucose monitoring to help people optimize their diets and so much more.
As Dr Means points out, eating the right food isn't sufficient. Whether a particular whole, plant food - say, a banana, a sweet potato, or bunch of grapes - will spike your glucose to a dangerously high level depends also on the time of day, what you're paring it with, your level of stress at that moment, how active you are physically, any environmental toxins that might be disrupting your metabolism, and the state of your microbiome.
Levels Health's monitor is the size of a stack of two quarters, attaches to the back of your upper arm, and tells your smartphone about your glucose level and heart rate every 15 minutes.
With this information, you can literally see how different foods and activities affect your blood sugar levels.
And blood sugar levels are highly predictive of long-term metabolic and overall health. Spikes and wide swings are not good for us, and lead in the short term to fatigue and mood swings, and inflammation, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, and dementia in the long term.
As a behaviorist, I love how that kind of hard, objective, instantaneous data can help us change behavior. Sure, sugar may make me fat in a month and sick in a year, but when it spikes my blood glucose in 10 minutes, that's when I'm motivated to do something about it.
In our conversation, I pitched all the hardball questions I could think of:
- What about carnivores who avoid all carbohydrates and could interpret their results as positive even if they're killing themselves?
- Isn't the root problem that humans are disconnected from nature? So how will more technology move us in the direction of natural health?
- What if the optimal diet for an individual isn't the best thing for animals, or the planet?
Dr Means not only handled them, but converted me to a believer. Her vision for instantaneous, closed-loop data actually holds the promise of moving us back in the direction of natural human movement, reduced pollutants and pesticides, less animal consumption (especially from factory farms pumping out antibiotic- and hormone- and pesticide-laden meat and dairy), and healthier soil and more regenerative agricultural practices.
Because health is holographic. You can't have a healthy skin cell on the pinky of your right hand if you have a systemic disease in your entire body. And we can't be healthy individuals within a diseased ecosystem, on an overburdened planet.
Given that according to a recent UNC study, fully 88% of the US adult population suffers from at least one metabolic dysfunction, there's a huge existing market for the device, which is currently available only via prescription. (Although they are running a public beta, which allows regular old consumers to sign up for the service directly from Levels Health website. Here's a link that allows you, as a loyal Plant Yourself listener, to cut to the front of the line.)
But the real potential game changer here is for the monitor to become as ubiquitous as FitBit - showing millions of people that the moment-to-moment choices they make immediately and significantly determine their metabolic health.
As the Levels Health blog reminds us, "Metabolism is Life."
Links
Levels Health
Get your own Levels Health Continuous Glucose Monitor (and skip the 60,000 person waiting list) - NOT an affiliate link
UNC Study on American metabolic health status
Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition