Precision Nutrition and Continuous Glucose Monitoring in People Without Diabetes: Promise, Evidence and Overreach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22303787Keywords:
Continuous glucose monitoring, Precision nutrition, Glycaemic variability, Time in range, OverinterpretationAbstract
Personalising diet by glucose response assumes that repeated responses to the same meal vary less within a person than responses
to different meals. Investigators examining that assumption report that it had not been rigorously tested, and that duplicate
presented meals produced unreliable individual responses in adults without diabetes. The population in question is also already
largely in range: across 4,135 euglycaemic participants, median time in the standard range was 95.8 per cent and median
glycaemic variability 14.8 per cent. Diet associations were present but weak, with rank correlations of 0.17 for carbohydrate
energy and 0.12 for ultra-processed food. Meta-analysis of monitoring as a behaviour change tool found favourable but modest
effects. Reviewers separately describe normal variability being read as a health threat, with anxiety and orthorexic patterns
reported.
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