Your phone buzzes with a notification: your blood sugar just spiked after breakfast. You open the app, see a sharp peak on the graph, and immediately feel a pang of guilt about the fruit you ate. This scenario is playing out on millions of arms across the world, as over-the-counter continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) have become the latest must-have wellness gadget. But as the trend accelerates, a growing chorus of doctors and researchers is asking a blunt question: if you’re healthy, what are you actually supposed to do with this information?
The numbers tell the story of a cultural moment. Since the FDA cleared the first over-the-counter CGM in 2024, devices like Dexcom’s Stelo and Abbott’s Lingo have moved from pharmacy shelves to gym bags, marketed not to people with diabetes but to the “glucose-curious”—anyone who wants to “optimize” their metabolism. Stelo alone garnered more than 140,000 users within months of its launch, and a subsequent analysis of roughly 136,000 Stelo users found that the majority did not have diabetes. The appeal is intuitive: real-time, minute-by-minute data on how your body responds to food, sleep, stress, and exercise feels like a window into your own biology.
But that window, experts argue, is clouded by a fundamental problem: for people without diabetes, we don’t yet know what the view is supposed to look like—or whether looking at it makes anyone healthier.
The Evidence Gap: What We Don’t Know
The scientific case for CGMs in healthy people is, in a word, thin. A major narrative review published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2026 concluded bluntly that “for people without diabetes, there is no good evidence that CGM improves health or prevents diabetes”. The researchers found no scientific evidence that continuous glucose monitoring prevents disease in this group, and noted that the technology is increasingly being used in populations where we “simply do not know whether it provides any benefit at all—or if it could even be harmful”.
This isn’t a fringe view. Johns Hopkins public health researchers put it plainly: “The devices have been transformative for people with diabetes, but there’s little evidence of benefits for people without the disease”. A meta-analysis of 23 studies found that people without diabetes who wore a CGM did not experience blood sugar stabilization, and while some made positive short-term dietary changes, the studies didn’t address whether those changes were sustained.
The core issue is one of interpretation. For someone with diabetes, a glucose reading has a clear clinical meaning—it informs insulin dosing, dietary choices, and activity decisions in a way that has been validated by decades of research. For someone without diabetes, the meaning of a post-meal spike to 160 mg/dL is genuinely uncertain. Normal glucose levels fluctuate throughout the day, and for healthy people, they generally return to a normal range within a couple of hours on their own. As behavioral scientist Liao Yue put it, “researchers still don’t know how these fluctuations affect health for people who don’t have diabetes. In the absence of meaningful metrics for interpreting these numbers, monitoring a constant stream of data doesn’t directly help people make health-related decisions and can lead to confusion and needless anxiety”.
The Real Risks: Anxiety, Restriction, and Opportunity Cost
The risks of CGM use in healthy people are not hypothetical. They fall into three main categories.
First, there is the risk of over-interpretation and anxiety. Normal glucose spikes can easily be read as problems that need fixing. The JAMA review warned that “normal fluctuations in blood glucose can easily be overinterpreted, potentially leading to unnecessary and unhealthy dietary restrictions or anxiety”. Clinicians are already seeing healthy people seek medical care to help make sense of their readings, even though there’s no evidence those readings lead to better health. One expert described the dynamic starkly: even when everything is completely normal, a person can convince themselves something is wrong.
Second, there is the risk of unnecessary dietary restriction. If you see that a banana causes a spike, the intuitive response is to avoid bananas. But fruit is healthy. The JAMA patient page explicitly warned that “using CGM to avoid spikes may lead people to unnecessarily restrict healthy foods (such as fresh fruit) or replace them with less healthy options”. The pursuit of a flatter glucose curve can inadvertently push people toward processed foods with a lower glycemic impact but inferior nutritional profiles.
Third, there is the cost—financial and otherwise. CGMs are not covered by insurance for people without diabetes, and some cost upwards of $200 out of pocket. The JAMA review noted that “time, focus, and money spent on CGM may take away resources from other aspects of life that are important for health and well-being”. There is also the physical cost: skin irritation from the adhesive, and the possibility of device malfunction or the sensor falling off.
Who Might Actually Benefit?
None of this means CGMs are useless for everyone without a diabetes diagnosis. There is a narrower group for whom the device may offer genuine value: people with prediabetes, those on a weight-loss journey, or individuals with conditions or medications (like lupus or steroids) that affect blood sugar and who want to understand their body’s responses.
For these users, the CGM can function as a behavioral feedback tool. Seeing a spike in real time can motivate dietary changes, increased physical activity, or better sleep habits. Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz, a lifestyle medicine physician, argues that “used short-term, CGMs are one of the more effective tools for helping people change behavior and connect what they eat, how they sleep, and how they move to what’s happening in their body”. The key word is short-term. Experts suggest using the device for 10 to 14 days at a time to gather insights, rather than wearing it indefinitely.
Even for this group, the benefit is primarily behavioral, not clinical. The research does not show that reducing spikes per se leads to better health outcomes. It shows that tracking the data can lead to healthier behaviors—and those behaviors are what matter.
The Screening Solution
If the goal is to understand your metabolic health and risk of diabetes, the evidence points to a different tool: standard lab screening. “If you have prediabetes, the only way to find out is to get screened” using lab tests, says diabetes researcher Elizabeth Selvin. “Regular screening using lab tests such as glucose and HbA1c is still the best way to understand risk”. A CGM cannot diagnose diabetes or prediabetes; it can only show you patterns in glucose that you may or may not be able to interpret correctly.
The CGM boom
is a fascinating case study in the collision between wellness culture and medical technology. The device itself is a genuine marvel—a continuous, minimally invasive window into a fundamental biological process. For people with diabetes, it is transformative. For people without diabetes, it is, at best, a short-term behavioral mirror; at worst, a source of anxiety, unnecessary restriction, and wasted money.
The honest answer to the question “do healthy people really need a glucose monitor?” is almost certainly no. Most healthy people would be better served by spending that $200 on a session with a registered dietitian, a gym membership, or simply a good pair of walking shoes. If you are genuinely concerned about your metabolic health—if you have risk factors for diabetes, if you feel unwell after meals, if you want to understand your body better—the first step is a conversation with a doctor and a standard lab test, not a wearable sensor.
The CGM is a powerful tool. But like any powerful tool, it works best when you know what you’re using it for—and when you have the training to interpret what it tells you. For the vast majority of healthy people, that training is absent, the interpretation is uncertain, and the data is more likely to confuse than to clarify. The trend may be here to stay, but the evidence suggests it should come with a warning label: this device is not a substitute for medical advice, and a spike is not always a problem.
