Video: Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM)

Hi, this is Dr. Minkoff, LifeWorks Wellness Center.

I want to talk to you about some research that I’ve been doing on continuous glucose monitoring. Now what does that mean?

When you eat food or when you don’t eat food, your body has to control the sugar level in your blood.

If you drained all the blood out of someone and measured how much sugar was actually in it, it would be about a teaspoon, about five grams of sugar.

Now if you have a glass of orange juice, you’re probably getting about 13 or 14 teaspoons of sugar in your blood.

If you have a coke it’s a little bit more. If you have a glass of carrot juice it’s about the same. So if you add a steak you’re getting very little. If you have eggs you’re getting very little.
But carbohydrate foods or sugary foods, they can give your body a stress of a lot of sugar, when in the system itself there’s very little sugar.

Now when that sugar comes in, your body has to now control that blood sugar because it’s stressful, it’s not normal and it takes the blood from its normal sort of gatorade consistency to if you put you know 16 times the amount you know you take 16 grams of sugar in, versus one gram which is in your bloodstream, you’re going to make that blood thicker, you’re going to sludge things, you’re going to make your white blood cells go like to sleep, so it’s not good. And we know that people who have high sugar and then high insulin and then inflammation and then high blood pressure and then fatty liver and then visceral fat and obesity, it’s all related and high triglycerides, these things are all related to the same thing.
So I think it’s really smart for about $65 or $70 a month, we can give you a prescription for a continuous glucose monitor. And it’s a little button that sits on your body, you can put it on your arm, I prefer it over here. And so it’s on all the time, I don’t feel it, I swim three hours a week, I’m in the water it doesn’t bother it, doesn’t do anything to it. I sweat, it stays on there, it’s no problem. And there’s an app on the phone.

So this is the app and if I want to know what my blood sugar is I just go like this and my blood sugar now is 101. I just had breakfast and so my average for the last 24 hours is actually my blood sugar has been 89 and if you look at the graph you can see a little bump here for dinner last night and then breakfast was not much, so I didn’t go up much.
But it tells you when you eat something, what happens to your blood sugar and if I eat something, if I have a cup of blueberries my blood sugar will go to 155 or 160 okay. So I’m trying to eat foods that keep my blood sugar low. For my body it’s proteins and vegetables, then my blood sugar isn’t affected hardly at all. But if I start to eat starchy foods or even legumes, like bean type foods that have a lot of starch in them it makes my blood sugar go way up. And if I would eat something like fruit juice, like carrot juice or it kicks the blood sugar way up which isn’t good. So I think for people if you’re overweight, if you have high blood pressure, if your triglycerides are high, if you’re a diabetic or a pre-diabetic, and you want to get control of it, we will write you a prescription for one of these monitors. Again it isn’t very expensive, it links to your phone and what you do is if you eat a food that makes your blood sugar go up, don’t eat that food and eat foods that don’t make your blood sugar go up very much and you will lose weight, your triglycerides will go down, your fasting insulin will go down, your fasting blood sugar will go down and the inflammation in your body will go way down. You will sleep better, you will be smarter, your vision will get better, your memory will get better because high blood sugar affects all these things and none of them are good. You know 50 or 100 years ago people ate almost no sugar. Their main foods were not sugary carbohydrate foods and now because this stuff is everywhere and it’s so tempting and most of us are addicted to sugar, we eat too much and so we have an epidemic of obesity and visceral fat and hypertension and high triglycerides and heart attacks and cancer and strokes and it’s all downstream from blood sugar not in good control. So this is an easy way to do it. I recommend that you try it. I’ve been doing it for about eight months myself. I learn a little bit every day.
And try it yourself because I know it’ll help you. Okay, good. Have a good day.