Almost a year go, I read an article in The Verge about a startup that promised to provide new fitness insights by measuring glucose levels in real-time. At that point the product wasn’t available to the public, so I signed up for their newsletter. Last month, I received an email saying they had open to the general public. I signed up, and order a patch for myself. I received three patches. This blog post shares the insights I gained from that first patch.
About the technology , the product, and the buying process
Levels is a startup that aims to help people understand more about their bodies using metabolic tracking as a proxy. The idea is that everyone responds differently to food products. A pizza might cause a glucose spike on you, but not on me. Understanding these spikes is important to tailor your diet in a way that minimizes these spikes.
When I signed up for Levels, I was asked if I wanted to participate in a trial. It sounded exciting, so I did. They sent me the monitor within three days. After I opened the Levels box, I was confused to see that the materials inside were mostly from Dexcom, a company that makes glucose monitors. I nevertheless followed the directions I was given, and installed the Dexcom app. The app wasn’t compatible with my phone, so I emailed Levels, and they provided with a refund.
A few weeks later, I came back from a two week trip in Mexico, and found out that the App was now working with my phone, and did the sign-up process.
Inserting the sensor is very easy. The sensor/part has comes inside a pistol. You put the pistol next to your belly button, click on it, and voila, the parch is monitoring your glucose after adding the transmitter.
Insights
Needless to say it is fascinating to see how different foods affect your glucose levels. For instance, I didn’t imagine that the Takis chips I love so much would provide a spike,and then a drop. However, the biggest takeaway I’ve had so far is: soda is REALLY, REALLY, bad.
See the graph below. It is from the first day using the sensor
As you can see, my glucose spiked to 212 mg/dL. I don’t know if this is high or low, but I can say that throughout the week, I never had such a big spike. It is bigger by ~60 points to the other spikes I had. More dramatic is the drop, I went in a few minutes down to 67 mg/dL, that’s a delta of 155 mg/dL. Again, not an expert, but sounds like a lot to me. Compare this to the day with least spikes I had:
On Sept. 1st, my biggest spike was of 159 mg/dL and it was due to the Takis Mexican Chips I eat. I regularly eat 70 grams per day. The high spike led me to consider reducing my intake to 30 grams per day. Compare the Takis spike with the Dinner spike. The dinner, with was pork cooked in onions, garlic, and mushrooms with a side of Kale, produced a small spike of 129 mg/dL. Also note the shape of the spikes. TheTakis produce a sudden spike, with a sudden drop, whereas the dinner spike is more gradual.
Biking, increased my glucose levels in the morning. This is sort of perplexing because the next day I swam, and my glucose levels went down. I would have imagined that exercise produces the same glucose response, but apparently that isn’t the case. I still don’t have a good hypothesis as to why this happens.
Equally insightful is the fact that not all foods with carb produce spikes. I ate some slices of pizza on 9/3, and my glucose barely spiked. An hour later, I ate two matcha kit-kats, and I also didn’t see a spike. The Kit-kats had 14 grams of sugar each, yet it seems like my body didn’t over-react when processing them.
I soon found a counterpoint to this. On Sunday Sept 4th, I ate a Salmon sandwich, with fries and coleslaw salad. Both created spikes as you can see below
The ice cream did take me above 180 mg/dL. One notable difference from these spikes is that they weren’t as steep as the soda spike. Note how the drop from the ice cream is more gradual than the soda drop.
One change that I did to my early morning routine before swimming was to try out a flavored yogurt instead of a regular yogurt. The flavored yogurt has 15 grams of sugar vs. 5 grams in the non-flavored yogurt. I did this to see if I could prevent the glucose drop I had seen before. Here are the results:
As you can see, the yogurt led to a small spike. It didn’t altogether prevent the drop. However, my body was able to bounce back faster than without the yogurt. On Sept. 5 I had two interesting insights: not all sandwiches are bad, and not all ice-cream is bad. If you recall, I had two big spikes in Sept 4th after eating a salmon sandwich, and an ice-cream. On Sept. 5, I ate a roast beef sandwich at Lunch, and one scoop of chocolate ice-cream. This ice-cream was notoriously less sugary than the one I had the day before. None of them created significant spikes or sudden drops.