Continuous Glucose Monitoring with Dan Zavorotny

george grombacher 0:00
Come on I’m left with is Georgie and the time is right welcome today’s guest strong, a powerful danza Rodney. Dan, are you ready to do this?

Unknown Speaker 0:18
Thanks so much for having me on. Really appreciate it your time.

george grombacher 0:21
Yeah. excited, excited, excited to have you on. Dan is the co founder of neutral sense. They’re a metabolic health company utilizing continuous glucose monitoring technology to provide real time data to clients, helping to avoid diabetes and heart disease, helping them to shut unwanted weight, or helping athletes reach reach their peak performance dentelles littlebyte, personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do.

Unknown Speaker 0:49
Sure, so I was working in healthcare consulting, and I was advising some of the top hospitals in the US insurance companies, medical device manufacturers. And so all these trends that we all know so well, which is we’re as a nation are getting sicker and sicker. While simultaneously we spend more and more money per capita on people. And no one’s getting any healthier. And so I was trying to figure out how do we fix the system, we constantly see that we are with the best doctors in the world. But oftentimes, they’re the best at prescribing medicine, or fixing the problems already there. So how do we take a step back and look at preventative health, some stats for fun, you know, 89 million Americans are pre diabetic, that’s one in three. Right, and this is a preventable disease. So it’s not something like type one diabetes, which you’re born with, or which has you have genetically inherited, there’s something you simply bad lifestyle decisions. And oftentimes, it’s not the individuals fault. It’s because we as Americans are great marketers. And so we market food that’s unhealthy for you. It tastes delicious. We’re great, great products that just make us one more of them. And so we eat, eat and eat. And oftentimes, we also work, work work and sedentary lifestyle of Starbucks all day. And so we fall in this trap of focus on things that are not important, which oftentimes drive us to gain weight, or even not gain weight, but just cause ourselves to drive stress, or are hurt ourselves through glucose, lack of glucose control. And so we’ve escaped me, my co founders decide what do we do to change the world and find some that’s mission driven. And we came across a device called continuous glucose monitoring. It’s a little device historically used by type one diabetics only to live. But we said, hey, this device helps providing insight into your metabolic health. It looks at your glucose in real time, 24/7 nonstop on your phone, and helps you correlate blood glucose to stress, sleep, exercise, and most importantly, nutrition. So now you’re able to understand what are these things I’m doing? How do they help me? You know, historically, right? Now, if you go to the doctor, and you ask the doctor, hey, I have some weight I want to lose or hey, my blood sugar is high. What do I do? The doctor gives you kind of generic advice, workout, eat better. What does that mean? We’re also unique that that advice simply doesn’t work across. We’ve seen this and now hundreds of people were a woman versus a man have completed response exaction food, someone’s demographics, Asian versus white versus black, completely different response, exact same food. Even something like pollution in your city has an impact. And so you have all these hundreds of variables that makes us unique. And yet people say, don’t eat bananas, eat oranges. But for who and we’ve seen this now we’ve done hundreds of tests where I actually eat a banana it looks like I’m like type two diabetic for two hours, while someone else will, you would have no impact. And yet I’m another hand can eat ice cream all day, I have no impact. Which is crazy to think that I can eat ice cream without a banana. Because my body is different than everyone else’s. So this gives you opportunity to understand your data in real time. And personalized to you. So it’s not some professional saying you should do this or not that it’s you doing something like getting food and then looking on your phone and seen it how you respond in real time. There’s no guessing there’s no subjectivity of someone else’s perception of which works and doesn’t it specifically to you? And we see this across the spectrum and diet world we see people saying vegans only doctor world, we’re the only guy that works. Someone else says no, it’s only keto diet only diet that works when it was only carnivore. The question is for who? And that’s really the point we’re trying to address here. And so we are focused on people who don’t yet have the knowledge of how to improve. And so we say hey, let’s give you the tools to really get there. And you can make decisions on your own. And we’ve won from anywhere from helping people who are type two diabetic diabetics to help them reverse diabetes to Olympic athletes trying to hit New Old records. The goal that we focus on is what we call high effort people. These are people who are motivated to make a change in their life. And that’s a very important attribute that we look for. Because no matter how great advice and a few of the bus consulting advisors in the world, if you’re not willing to put the effort into it, it’s simply not going to work. So it’s the high effort, folks, which is simply a mind. It’s a state of mind that we look at.

george grombacher 5:27
Nice. Was it the happiest day of your life when you discovered that you could eat ice cream and not dinner?

Unknown Speaker 5:37
Yeah, well, ironically enough, for a lot of people, including myself, eating sugar for breakfast is better than eating sugar for at nighttime. So there’s this idea of, we know circadian rhythm. But there’s also the same concept with nutrition where as you get closer, nighttime, not for everyone, but for most people. You can process food and sugar, as well at nighttime. So, ironically, we always eat dessert for dinner. And we always say stay away from sugar for morning. But scientifically speaking, it is for most people, not for everyone. But for most people. It is better to eat sugary things in the morning, and then a nighttime.

george grombacher 6:15
Yeah, I think that that’s certainly like biggest, I guess intellectually that, that that that makes sense. So everything he talked about resonates makes perfect sense. And so it sort of begs the question, why wouldn’t everybody do this. And that’s exactly the problem that you’re trying to solve. You’re trying to give people the tools to be able to to make this happen. It just kind of popped into my head with without continuously monitoring my glucose and being able to look real time with the responses. I can still try these different diets. But it’d be really hard to actually eliminate all the different factors because to your point, there’s pollution in the environment, there’s there’s stress. So I don’t know, if I’m trying to just eat bananas or trying to just eat potatoes. If all the other factors are kind of kicking in. I’m sort of just guessing at it. Yeah, but this this, this removes all the guesswork.

Unknown Speaker 7:13
Exactly. I mean, this is what you have, you always have that one buddy who’s like, either keyed on or lost 200 pounds, you should do it. And you try keto. And you’re like, what’s not working for me why? Right, that’s the one piece and the second piece is like, you don’t know what you don’t know. We this we build software on top that basically helps you kind of combine all this data together. So it integrates both with like the wearables, whether it’s your Apple Watch, or Fitbit, whatever it is, or if you want to manually type in your workouts or your food you’re eating. But what happens is, we see us all time where people will have perfect diets, perfect workouts, perfect everything. And yet, they’re gaining weight. And we see everyday 3pm They this glucose spike. And everyday, we’re like, what are you doing 3pm. And they have to go, I’m meeting my boss at 3pm. And their boss is causing stress. And that stress is spiking their glucose and it’s making them an uncomfortable position, which is causing them to be unhealthy. But then never even thought about that. That’s number one. The number two is also we live in this world of constant stress, that we’re no longer understand what normal feels like because stress is normal for us. So you just don’t know. And then what happens sometimes we tell you like, Hey, do meditation, do breathing exercises and watch your glucose decrease, improve. And then people start having a mind body connection. It’s It sounds very nebulous. But mind body connection is very important concept to have. Because once you see your glucose improve, and you start feeling differently, you start realizing Hmm, I’ve never felt this way. This is what good feels like. But I’ve had 20 years of stress, and I’ve never been able to eliminate it. But now I know how and you can feel connected with it. And you just just feel like a happy person. I mean, it helps sleep too, by the way dramatically.

george grombacher 9:01
Yeah. Again, I don’t doubt it. So how does it actually work?

Unknown Speaker 9:06
Do I? Sure. So use a little device. It’s the size of a dime, pretty small. There’s a sight tiny little filament that sits on there. And you insert into your arm. It penetrates the skin just a tiny bit, a couple of millimeters. And what it does is a constantly tracks your blood sugar and your body for 14 days. On this little device. There is a NFC chip that sends it to your phone. There’s also what’s Bluetooth but it sends to your phone in real time. So it takes measurements every 15 minutes and constantly updates your date on your phone. And what you’re doing is you can go as deep or as high level as you want. You can either track everything you eat, or track nothing will have dieticians, experts reaching out to you and giving you feedback. But in general, the more you put into it, the more you get out. That’s why I say high effort Um, you could just take pictures of food because we want to start correlating these things. Because you know, we don’t live our life in silos we don’t know, like, only eat only workout only sleep only cost stress, we do all these things together. And so by tracking all of it, we’re starting slowly to segregate this data out and understand what are the main drivers? Because people, you people are realizing that like, poor sleep, cause you have a bad workout, bad workout, cause you’re maybe not eating enough, are you too much. Or if you too much, you might not sleep? Well. And so the other is constant causality, which is bi directional. It’s not one cause other it’s the cause each other. And if you’re tired, you make poor decisions, because you just are not able to have full control. So the idea is, let’s try understand what are the biggest pain points? And how do we pull that out. But step one is having objective data about your body. And in real time, you know, historically, we think about what you’ve done is, it’s either non real time or not very objective. So it’s, historically we use scale at home to measure our weight. But I mean, what does that mean? Weight is not an important number, because includes muscle whose water whose fat, so you can put on more muscle and since you weigh more, but it’s actually positive, not a negative. That’s number one. And number two is the other measures, we do get our annual physical a lot people do that, and we get their glucose numbers, we get our cholesterol panel, right blood panel. But it’s once a year, maybe if you really go getter you get once every six months. But it’s truly by that point, number one. But number two is these numbers are averages. So you might have these incredibly high, bad foods that are causing you harm. And then you will have these extreme crashes from those foods, and you have this extreme fatigue. And on average, you know, if you take a 250, you got a good number on average. However, if you look at the peaks and valleys of this, glucose spikes, and glucose dips, it just shows you that you have a terrible diet, and you’re causing in you causing harm to yourself without even realizing it, right. With all these types of lifestyle decisions. It’s not like your normal today is more you’ve type two diabetes, it’s more so you’re causing micro damage, you know, 1000s of times, and over time it builds up, I will say I give comparison, if somebody like touches your shoulder one time, there’s nothing that happens. But if that’s what your shoulder nonstop for next 25 years, three times, 1000 times a day, you’re gonna have a bruise there, you’re gonna have a bruise there. It’s a fact that even no matter how lightly I touched you, you’re gonna have a bruise. That’s exactly what’s happened inside your body. And people sometimes don’t comprehend it. Because it’s long term. And people we as human beings think about short term rewards, which is I eat the sugar, I feel almost like a high, I get excited to same, you know, responds dopamine responses cocaine, like so, so addictive. But it’s not just the sugar we it’s the foods all around us, we go to restaurants, and they add extra ingredients that make us respond orally, we don’t even know. We see this, interestingly enough, when we go to Europe versus us, we do the exact same foods in Europe versus the US. Much worse response to bread pasta, in US versus Italy, or Spain or France, which is ironic is the exact same food but ingredients and whatever it is they put in our food system. I don’t know, that causes us to eat the same amount of pasta, but have much worse response here.

george grombacher 13:24
It’s fascinating. So how much does it cost? How do I get it? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 13:29
it’s about 200 hours a month. So not cheap. I think, unfortunately, the hardware still in early infancy. This, these hardware pieces of hardware have not been around for very long. And they only last 14 days. So the technology is improved. These last six hours and 12 hours and 24 hours now they’re about 14 days, our ambitions, they start lashing hopefully in future six months a year. Not at that stage Knology yet. And because you remember it, here’s there’s the hardware, there’s like a biotechnology because you’re inside your body partially with microneedle. But that’s the route we’re going. So this is still getting early adopters, or people who really care about the health. I think once we get under $100 a month, it’ll become much more reasonable accessible to, you know, more global world and everyone else. But if I compare is like orange theory, right, orange theory or core power yoga, it’s in a similar price range right now. So still early adopters. But again, I don’t think you need to do this all the time. What we see people do is they do it for two, three months, and they get enough out of it. And they may take a year or two year break. Right. But in the grand scheme of things, the way I look at it is what is your life worth to you? And is $600 that you spent for three months on this versus six analogies spent a restaurant going out the benefits cost so that’s kind of how I look at it. Again, this is where everyone has priorities in life. Some people want a new car so we want a new TV. Some people want you know the new iPhones we want to have a healthy life and in their seven These ladies be able to play their grandkids and that’s in the wheelchair. Yeah.

george grombacher 15:05
That’s It’s always fascinating to me why it is that people finally do decide to make some kind of a substantive, meaningful change in their life. If it is I just actually got a diagnosis of being pre diabetic diabetic by my doctor, or I saw somebody that got, you know, died, whatever, I turned 40 foot, whatever it is, you know, so I’m sure that y’all are doing everything you can to kind of collect that information and data of what it was that actually finally made you sign up. Because, you know, 200 bucks a month? Yeah, sure. That’s not it’s not a tiny amount of money, but to what we’re talking about, we’re talking about you feeling better and being healthier and having a healthy and happy long life. So it’s an investment.

Unknown Speaker 15:52
Yeah, I agree. And I mean, I think this is one of the piece that it’s we’re bombarded with marketing all day, every day. And unfortunately, sometimes we don’t, we don’t have attention span anymore these days to determine what the important things in life are. And I think when you have these trigger events, where like, somebody tells you pre diabetic or someone, your family dies, then you’re like, oh, shoot, I need to take control of my life. And that’s the point we say, Okay, we’re here to help you. The mindset has to be an individual ready to make that step forward.

george grombacher 16:25
Yeah, and I bet, Dan, that when you start seeing your, your body’s response to that crispy chicken sandwich that you just got it a drive thru, you know, that you’re gonna stop eating that, which is going to help you save an enormous amount of money on your grocery bill, on a monthly basis.

Unknown Speaker 16:43
Yeah, I mean, ironically enough, this is where it’s interesting, you know, our focus was to help people with pre diabetes, type two diabetes, things that people who have some kind of health and wellness issue that we need to focus on. But the amount of professional Olympic athletes signed up is exorbitant, because they realize, like, hey, if I can tie my diet in perfect, if you think about a cyclist, you know, they go, they have these crashes. And they have this goo, they just chug this goo, or this gel that I don’t know, like, that’s all sugar. And you know, if they can figure out when they’re going to crash before the crash, they can actually just eat a normal meal and not have this up and down. And they can actually set records and they’re able to continuously keep going. We see this with suppressible soccer players, basketball players, they just, they’re able to time and much better, because right now, again, all the nutrition has given feedback, and they’ve been the best nutrition in the world and digesting the world giving them like, you guys should have the X amount of protein X amount of fat, excellent carbs, you have this time around and you know, halfway through game or before the game. But like, Yes, I know that you’ve been you’re the best. But still, there’s still 13 people or 15 people on the basketball team, let’s say they all have very different spots to food, they all have different ages, they have different microbiomes, they have so many different unique factors. When you start seeing this where one guy, he actually shouldn’t eat a lobby for the game. And one guy should eat for hours and other guys should one hour before. And you start seeing these differences and actually perform differently, and they perform better by a justice. And so these things are vital. We also see this idea of we love women and men are just so dramatically different. And historically, most research has been done in a clinical setting is done on men, which is mind blowing to me. One of the main reasons is guess what men don’t have menstrual cycles, it’s cheaper to do research studies, because you could do a 30 day period, the men’s metabolic men’s information is basically more flat all there. There’s not at a level two men talking about this, but they don’t have a menstrual cycle happening. So the data just stays flat. And it’s easier to control for other factors. So oftentimes, they’ll do studies only on men, but they’ll claim study as results found. And so inland fasting is a big one, where we’ve now seen 1000s and 1000s of women have negative impact amendments fasting. And yet it’s advertised like inland fasting gonna solve all your problems that becomes big fad. And yet a lot of women are struggling with it. And we ignore the sixth part of this, which is purely why it’s very vital to not

george grombacher 19:17
Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, that makes perfect sense. And you just made this super compelling argument. If you are an athlete of any kind, or just you’re interested in having more energy throughout your day as a professional. Why wouldn’t you want to know? I mean, it’s almost ridiculous. To not know, you know, this is, you know, the real optimum times, I’m trying to get the highest level of performance and the amount of time that I have not trying to get people to work 24 hours a day, Dan, that if you’ve got eight hours to work, why not make sure that you can optimize that set amount of time, so I love it. The other people are ready for that difference making tip. What do you have for them?

Unknown Speaker 19:57
Yeah, I know we didn’t touch base on this at all, but I think You know, my background. And now neuroscience, we started about three years ago now we’re over 160 people on our company. And we got there by hiring the best people. So I always encourage everyone, to if you’re building a company, hire the best people, people and make the biggest difference. Just like I said, we make sure our members and customers are high effort, we’re gonna make sure our employees and team members are high effort. Because in the grand scheme of things, that is really a key driver. It’s, you know, we’re not sending rockets into space, we’re not doing brain surgery. Everything can be learned, as long as you get the right people in the right bus.

george grombacher 20:37
Well, I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets calm. Dan, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? And how can they get involved with neutral sense?

Unknown Speaker 20:48
Sure. You guys can check me out on Dan’s Rodinia, LinkedIn, feel free to add me if you have any questions or comments or anything, always happy to chat and help people. You could check on neutral sense.io, that’s n u t, r i s e n s e.io. Don’t buy anything. Don’t worry about buying anything. There’s a ton of content we provide around the test. And we do for 1000s of people that I think will provide a lot of insights. So you could put in zero and learn, hey, maybe I’m a woman in this age group or men in this age group, but just kind of sitting this kind of city. What will my results on proximately look like? If I tried this, and I think it gives you some insight, you might not get to the 100% accuracy. But you get to 95% there. And there’s a lot of myths we bust about science, we make sure that we spent a lot of resources and breaking through the fads, and giving you the details and facts about information. So I highly recommend if you look for resources, like how to improve my metabolic health or just my health journey, go check out the resources we’re happy to sign up for a newsletter if you sign up for newsletter and we send you more information about how to improve your health.

george grombacher 21:53
Love it. If you enjoyed as much as I did shut down your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas can find Dan on LinkedIn. And I think I did mispronounce your name Dan at the top. So sorry about that. Go to neutral sense that I O N u t r i s e n s e.io and take advantage of all the great resources and information that they’ve got on the site and start busting through some of those myths that we all have in our heads about diet and exercise and just healthy living and I mean take advantage of of this great information and then this great resource and start living healthy and feeling great. Thanks, Ken. Thanks, George. Appreciate it. And until next time, fighting the good fight. We are all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai