No. Glucose Monitoring Is No Substitute for Obesity Medicine

Let’s start with a few basics. Expensive bunk is not a substitute for actual healthcare. And glucose monitoring (in the absence of diabetes) is no substitute for obesity medicine. Not even close.

Unfortunately right now, the latest DIY fashion for ineffectively dealing with obesity is self-monitoring – for its own sake. Not for the sake of actually improving your health. But for going through the motions of proving that your health is yours to control and if you have any health problems … well, we told you so. It’s your own fault. This is where self-stigma in obesity starts.

The MAHA Prescription

Our Secretary of Health and Human Services latched onto this bogus idea in testimony this week to the Subcommittee on Health of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce:

“You know the Ozempic is costing $1300 a month. If you can achieve the same thing with an $80 wearable, it’s a lot better for the American people. We’re exploring ways of making sure that those costs can be paid for.”

There’s just one catch. Self-monitoring, though it might be useful at times, doesn’t do the same thing that highly effective obesity medicines do.

In fact, it can amount to little more than an expensive placebo. Writing for Vox, Adam Clark Estes explains:

“Health tracking in its current form is not a science or even an art. It’s certainly not the near future of the American health care system, as some MAHA followers might make you believe. Health tracking, at its core, is a self-driven experiment in better living for those who can afford these products and have the time to spare to comb through their own data. In some ways, it’s just an expensive hobby. Like running or perfecting your smoothie recipes, it can be good for you. Wearing a smart ring or a glucose monitor alone won’t make you feel better.”

Self-Monitoring Has Its Place

If you have diabetes, glucose monitoring can be critically important. If not, it can be useless or misleading. Tracking weight or blood pressure can be helpful if a person has good reason to pay attention to either one. But obsessing over either measure can go too far, leading to unhelpful anxiety.

But No, Self-Monitoring Is No Substitute for Healthcare

Monitoring in the absence of options for medical care takes a person nowhere. Proposing to take Medicaid and nutrition programs away from millions of Americans while spending money on “one of the biggest campaigns” in HHS history to put a wearable health monitor on “every American within four years” is wildly irrational.

Sad to say, though, it’s not surprising.

Click here for more on the HHS Secretary’s testimony, here and here for more on self-monitoring.

Continuous Glucose Monitor, photograph by Thirunavukkarasye-Raveendran, licensed under CC BY 4.0

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June 27, 2025