#195 Continuous Glucose Monitoring for Better Metabolic Health - Kara Collier

Kara Collier (0:00)

If you're constantly having glucose in high levels, it's going to lead to insulin resistance, and it's going to lead to chronic condition, and it's like cardiovascular disease. But if we think about in like a more zoomed in level of also the other consequences of high glucose levels, it's really affecting our microvascular of the body. So it's actually glucose spikes and high glycemic variability are an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

SPEAKER_2 (0:26)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:30)

Body Mind Empowerment.

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Siim Land (0:38)

Everything the body needs.

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Siim Land (0:42)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm a host Siim Land, and our guest today is Kara Collier. Kara is the head of nutrition at nutrisense.io, which is a company that offers commercial continuous glucose monitoring services. Your glucose is one of the best indicators of overall metabolic health and flexibility. I also tried out their CGM software, and it was very easy to comprehend and use. It's an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to gain more insight into how certain foods affect their metabolism and glucose levels. You can get a $20 discount off the Nutrisense CGM by using the code Siim at nutrisense.io. That's Siim, S-I-I-M, at nutrisense.io.

Kara, welcome to the show.

The services that your company provides is really important and fascinating as well. It's going to help you to gain a lot of insight into your overall health and metabolism. How did you become involved with Nutrisense and how did you start working on them?

Kara Collier (1:42)

I'm a registered dietitian and my interests in metabolic health and glucose metabolism really stemmed from my early career in the hospital system. So I was working primarily in ICUs and it was a very frustrating experience overall.

Everyone who's coming into the ICU was not coming in for a gunshot wound or a car accident, but they're coming in because of complications of lifestyle-related chronic diseases.

So diabetes complications, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease. So it felt like it was all of this unnecessary suffering. And then I was meeting people way too late. I'm seeing them when they're in critical condition and we're trying to make lifestyle changes and it's just not a good place to be. So I became kind of obsessed with the topic of what is tying all of these together? And then what do we do about it? And really what's the root of all of these chronic conditions as metabolic dysfunction? So insulin resistance and what do we do about it? And how we have to catch it earlier and we have to motivate people to care about it from an earlier stage. So I became obsessed with continuous glucose monitoring at that stage from my experience in the hospital because it really solves the problem of you have this real time data. So it's actually motivating to people to understand their health and take care of it early on. And it's driving at the root of a lot of these chronic conditions. So from there kind of jump ship in the traditional health care system and help start the company Nutrisense with two other guys.

And then what we're doing there is we're using these CGMs and non-diabetics to try to prevent those chronic conditions I was seeing day in and day out and trying to catch it way earlier so that people can actually optimize their health and in a meaningful way with data from their own body. So pretty obsessed with this topic. And I think it's really key to people to be able to see what's actually happening inside their bodies. Right now these devices in America at least are prescription only. And so we're trying to reduce that barrier to entry because we believe that everyone should have access to this data about themselves and make changes or decisions based on their own body and not just you know whatever fad diets floating around or whatever that you know somebody on Instagram is telling them but instead like real data from your body just like you know lots of other wearables, HRV, all of this is really important for people to be monitoring.

Siim Land (4:08)

Yeah absolutely like the best prevention or the best cure is like prevention that you prevent yourself from getting sick and it's really easy to get lost in some of the like minutiae or some of the things that aren't as important as just like the fundamentals such as your you know glucose metabolism and the insulin sensitivity so that's like really that's unfortunate like the mainstream medicine doesn't really take into account and they only resort to it only like in very like unconventional circumstances like they may only prescribe these glucose monitors to actual diabetics and they they don't use it as prevention preventative tools which are actually the most applicable use for them where you actually do use them before you get sick.