Photo: Shape Magazine
Weight loss is a touchy subject in any circle across the world. People either throw as much exercise at potential weight loss or choose to just ignore it. But, of course, ignoring weight gain can lead to life-threatening diseases, such as Type 2 Diabetes, and progress to heart disease.
None of us want to see that reality. But, at the same time, Type 1 diabetes requires continuous monitoring of the blood before, after, and adjusting insulin to deal with increased blood sugar levels. This is why any improvement can be made to more accurately read blood sugar levels. Additionally, if the same monitoring could lead to preventative weight loss, that would be desirable too.
In a recent brief by Politico Future Pulse, new technology to be considered by the FDA is a top issue for lawmakers. Here is the brief:
What if the secret to weight loss was a matter of sugar and not fat? Several startups, including January AI, Signos, Levels Health and Supersapiens, swear that continuously monitoring your blood sugar levels will lead to better health and might even help you slim down. But to get the promised results, those companies need to connect to FDA-approved medical devices to know how a person’s sugar levels rise and fall when they eat certain foods and exercise. Instead of going through an FDA-approval process to directly access that data, companies like Signos are launching large-scale studies.
“If you have a chocolate cake, great. We will tell you exactly the minimum workout to do to mitigate the spike and not gain weight from it,” Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, CEO of Signos, tells POLITICO. “That, to me, is a better diet than saying never eat dessert ever again, right?”
Not just for diabetes — Continuous glucose monitors are petite medical devices that inject a piece of filament just below the skin’s top layer to estimate blood sugar levels. When too much sugar is in a person’s blood too often, their body can no longer absorb glucose properly, which can lead to weight gain, organ dysfunction and other health problems. Typically, doctors prescribe those devices to people with diabetes so they can see when their blood sugar spikes and take insulin. But in recent years, a handful of companies have latched onto the idea that understanding how a healthy person’s blood sugar levels correspond to eating specific foods might help fend off diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol.
Typical continuous glucose monitors are FDA-regulated medical devices. To give healthy Americans access to such devices, Signos works with doctors to prescribe the monitors off label. The data from the CGMs is then sent to its app. Because Signos’ app isn’t FDA approved, it can’t connect directly to CGMs, which delays how fast the data comes in.
“Typically, this is for diabetics,” says Fouladgar-Mercer. “God forbid some developer grabs this and displays the wrong data, and someone doses insulin on it.”
But that lag makes it difficult for apps like Signos to advise people when their sugar spikes in the moment so they can blunt it with, say, an after-dinner walk. In lieu of FDA approval, Signos has launched a five-year, 20,000-person study to prove that its app can help people lose weight.
Startups court oversight — Under the purview of an institutional review board, the study will allow the company to integrate its app with Dexcom’s G6 CGM so the app can pull the device’s data as it comes in. We’re likely to see more companies take a similar approach, using studies to showcase their effectiveness with healthy populations. Already, one company, Levels, is planning two large-scale studies to exhibit how its app, with the help of a CGM, can improve health outcomes.
Wow! This technology could lead to the collecting and processing of real-time data to provide each person with specific exercising elements/procedures that might mitigate weight loss. Meaning, that eating the pizza slice for lunch could be counter-acted by walking briefly after eating. Or carrying out another exercise method briefly compared to spending hours in the gym. Pretty cool.
