RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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No more needles. Until the Google Pixel Watch 5 arrived as part of Google's Made by Google 2026 event , the only way most people could monitor their blood sugar's responses to food and exercise with smart tech was to use a continuous glucose monitor, or CGM . A small puck with a Bluetooth receiver inside and a spike to connect to your blood, it projects your blood sugar levels to your phone in real time.
Very useful — and originally developed — for diabetics, it was also quickly co-opted by the wellness sector and marketed as a way to curb blood sugar spikes. I attended a product launch for one of these devices in a fancy hotel, where a celebrity chef talked us through how to make healthy canapés that wouldn't spike our blood sugar, As proof, we could see our blood sugar broadcast to our phones in real time, monitored by the needles in our arms.
Too much sugar increases the body's insulin resistance, leading to fat storage, while exercise uses your body's glucose stores as fuel. Simple enough in theory, but I found the constant readings from the CGM easy to obsess over during my trial period, checking my graphs after every meal and mentally planning how much exercise would be needing to offset the effect of those spikes. I am not diabetic.
The Google Pixel Watch 5 is heralding in, as part of its passive-tracking Health Guardian suite of features, a non-invasive Insulin Resistance Trends feature for Pixel Watches 3 and above. According to Google: 'The tool uses passive sensors on your wrist to track monthly shifts in your metabolic health, reserving formal lab work for when you're at the doctor's office.
'The goal of this new feature is to help you take control of your health journey, serving as a gentle reminder to pause and check your routines,' continues Google's press release. 'When this Health Guardian feature detects sustained, elevated insulin resistance trends over the month, it alerts you with a gentle nudge to help you adjust your daily habits and get your metabolic health back in its sweet spot.'
(Image credit: Getty Images)
'Metabolic health' refers to the process of your body turning food into energy. A healthy body turns food and sugar into energy very effectively, while an unhealthy body works harder to mitigate those blood sugar spikes, leading to excess blood sugar being stored as fat rather than fuel. This results in weight gain and in some cases, Type-2 diabetes.
The feature isn't on watches yet (it'll arrive next month) and there's no indication of exactly how Google has been able to wrangle its optical LED sensors to manage this non-invasive Insulin Resistance Trends monitoring.
In its press materials, Google has been keen to emphasize that 40% of Americans are living with 'invisible shifts in their metabolic health'. The feature might help the US obesity crisis with a two-pronged assault; education about insulin resistance, and providing an accessible way to monitor this growing health problem without sticking a needle in your arm
However, just as I could see myself compulsively checking my blood sugar graphs, I worry that this might become yet another metric for otherwise-healthy smartwatch users to obsess over. Like weighing yourself every day or taking GLP-1s, weight management techniques can quickly transform from a healthy, positive thing into an addiction.
(Image credit: Shutterstock / Sergio Mak)
Research published in the Cardiovascular Digital Health Journal in 2020 has identified a trend we've seen before in health tech users: an obsession with metrics, streaks and optimization.
The researchers said that although wearables provide lots of actionable data and improve real-time surveillance of disease, they found "another aspect of the digital health revolution that has not yet received due attention: the unanticipated and potentially negative effects of wearable devices on patients’ psychological health, quality of life, and health care utilization."
Just recently, our writers Becca Caddy and Alex Blake wrote about their own experiences with this phenomenon, with Caddy stating "What I didn't understand at the time was how thin the line between discipline and obsession can be. You can cross it gradually, one habit and one goal at a time, until something that started as a genuine attempt to look after yourself becomes another source of pressure, anxiety and control."
The messaging around weight management can be difficult to get right, and as much as the feature is likely to improve wearer's health, I worry Insulin Resistance Trends could become quite a triggering metric for people at risk of disordered behaviors.
To Google's credit, however, the glimpse of the feature we've seen so far isn't a moment-to-moment graph. Instead, it shows month-to-month general trends, presumably to avoid people checking the feature too much. There's also a lot of good to be done around educating users about the relationship between blood sugar, insulin, weight gain, and diabetes.
Regardless, when the feature does arrive next month, I hope thought is put into its execution so we can have as many of the good consequences as possible, while avoiding the bad.
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