Continuous glucose monitoring for blood sugar control with Casey Means, MD

Casey Means, MD is a Stanford-trained physician, Chief Medical Officer and Co-founder of metabolic health company Levels, and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention. Her mission is to maximize human potential and reverse the epidemic of preventable chronic disease by empowering individuals with tech-enabled tools that can inform smart, personalized, and sustainable dietary and lifestyle choices. Dr. Means’s perspective has been recently featured in the New York Times, Men's Health, Forbes, Business Insider, Techcrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Hill, Metabolism, Endocrine Today, and more. She has held research positions at the NIH, Stanford School of Medicine, and NYU.

In this episode, Dr. Casey Means talks about the importance of understanding your glucose levels with the help of the continuous glucose monitor device (CGM), and how the change of the glucose levels throughout the day affects different areas of everyone’s life. She talks all about the metabolic disfunction that most American adults deal with, and how those conditions are actually preventable with the right diet and lifestyle choices. 

Dr. Casey explains why this knowledge is important to people who don’t have any metabolic conditions, and how it can help people prevent developing them in the future. She goes over different areas of life, including diet, sleep, exercise, and activity levels, and how they can affect the overall health and specifically the glucose levels.   

Dr. Casey Means mentions metabolic flexibility and goes over what it actually is, and how it works. She explains how our bodies switch between using glucose for energy to using fat based on different availability. Then she covers why the personalization of a diet can be very effective, and how everyone’s body responds differently to the same foods. With the use of the CGM you can actually optimize your own dietary preferences to make it most healthy for you.

And lastly, Dr. Casey means explains how the Levels app works and how to use the data collected by the continuous glucose monitor.

Key Takeaways:

[ 2:08 ]  Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) for personalized dietary lifestyle.
[ 4:06 ]  Why it is important to understand glucose levels even if you don’t have diabetes. 
[ 8:42 ]  One to one relationship between what you are eating and what happens to your body.
[ 14:40 ]  Sleep deprivation and stress.
[ 23:10 ]  HIIT has a paradoxical effect on glucose.
[ 24:53 ]  Metabolic flexibility.
[ 29:40 ]  Diet personalization.
[ 36:48 ]  If I have a CGM on and I am not a diabetic, what should my glucose levels look like over 24 hour period?
[ 39:30] The dawn phenomenon in people who are non-diabetic.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Dr. Casey Means’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcaseyskitchen/

Dr. Casey Means’ Twitter: https://twitter.com/drcaseyskit