January’s Noosheen Hashemi on Preventing Diabetes by Promoting Gut Health
Thank you for tuning in. Here is the full transcript from this week’s episode. We has a great talk with Nosheen Hashemi – the Founder and CEO of January AI. I hope you enjoy!
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Harry Glorikian: Noosheen, welcome to the show or I should say, back to the show.
Noosheen Hashemi: Thank you for having me, Harry.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, I know. It’s great to have you back. I was thinking about, so much has changed because the last time we spoke officially, was back in June of 2021. And I don’t know, maybe it’s COVID or everything, but it just feels like time has changed in its meaning when you when you talk to people again.
And so I was thinking, you know, it’s been so long, you know, for for the folks that may have not heard that first interview or don’t remember all the details, can you start by giving your standard two minute explanation on January and and what’s happening at the company and why you believe the ability to to see and predict blood glucose levels is so important.
Noosheen Hashemi: Sounds good. Our mission at January is to increase the world’s health span. Our goal is to have a billion people prevent lifestyle diseases through smarter eating. We’ve taken two approaches to this. One is our AI. And one is our supplement, that I’ll talk about later.
Both of them have been subjects of years of research. What we wanted to do with AI was we weren’t satisfied with just being able to tell what someone’s glucose value is. The wonderful glucose monitors that are out there right now already can do that for you.
They can already tell you that you can wear the glucose monitor, you can use the app that comes with the monitor and pretty much understand where your glucose is right now.
What we were interested in is to find out if we could actually predict someone’s glucose. Could we create a biological model of their body so that we could predict their glucose? And last time I talked about how we did that and what a long and arduous process that is, to build a biological model of a person’s body, taking two main inputs, which is the heart rate, basically activity, and food.
But we’ve done that in a maddening fashion, trying to turn food into an assay which which I can talk about again if we want to. But our prediction model is highly accurate. It is more accurate than anything else that is out there, except for two papers that don’t do certain things that we do.
And what we have what we’re calling now the world’s first virtual CGM, where we’re able to essentially train our machine learning models based on your body’s data. AFter four days of training with a heart rate monitor and a continuous glucose monitor and your food logs, we’re able to predict your response to any food in our 32 million strong atlas.
The way we do it, the way ours work, so the standard out there right now is if you’re wearing a CGM, you can get a prediction from some products 30 minutes into the future while the CGM is on your body and not if you eat something. With our prediction models, we can predict hours into the future.
We can predict when a CGM is not on your body after the period of training. And we we can predict for food. So we can actually say not your where your glucose is going to be if you don’t eat anything, but what is your where is your glucose is going to be if you have this donut versus that apple versus this toast versus versus versus whatever versus the Starbucks croissant or or something else, or Cheez-Its or pick any food that you’d like out of the 30 million strong atlas.
And the beauty of this, beauty of AI is it helps you do, it allows you to do, it allows education experientially, it allows mindful eating. How does education work? Well, you have counterfactuals. It says, Harry, you ate this food. But if you had eaten this other thing, this would have been your blood glucose.
Noosheen Hashemi: Harry, you ate this food. But if you had eaten this food and walked 10 minutes, this would have been your blood glucose. So the counterfactuals are really powerful tools to get people to think about, Oh, that’s really interesting. I could still eat this food.
I just need to get up and move after eating this food. So we’re all about giving solutions to people as opposed to “Don’t do this, don’t do that all” than all the don’ts. We’re all about. How can we serve people, actually getting them to realize what does work for them and what they can do.
So the other thing that that the AI can do is help you decide, like if you want, if you’re comparing two recipes to make for your family or you’re sitting in a restaurant at Cheesecake Factory, you want to you want to know which which Cheesecake Factory cheesecake to have or which which meal to have.
You can just look up its values and you can see the curve. We draw the curve for you of how you’re going to respond to this. The impact of this is massive. So for consumers, you’re able essentially to get your model built once with one CGM and then be able to take that knowledge to any grocery store, any restaurant, any, any recipe, anywhere. You want to see what the reaction is without having to spend more money.
This tremendously increases access and equity.
Harry Glorikian: So if somebody, I mean, do they need to do an update every once in a while? I’m just thinking out loud because I haven’t been wearing a CGM for a while. Right. And so you’re like, well, should I should I stick one in my arm just to see how my body has maybe changed?
Noosheen Hashemi: We we, we strongly believe in intermittent CGM use, so we think it would be really good to do it once a quarter maybe. And because people lose weight, they gain weight, they travel, they get pregnant, lots of things happen that changes your status. You age and it is important.
So we definitely recommend intermittent. But think of it as 30 people that took a GWAS test and they were able to see, oh, I may be more likely lactose intolerant. Oh, I may more likely than others to be metabolizing caffeine slowly or this metabolizing this drug slowly or not metabolizing this drug very much at all. And what the genetics did for us, wearables can do in in the way of digital biomarkers.
They can they can tell a lot about your health as well. So, you know, and then the ramifications of the virtual CGM are huge for other industries.
For example, you can, for big food and big pharma, they are able to do virtual product development in food. For example, you could use digital twins to to look at whether, what would happen if you if you remove this much of this sugar and added this much fiber, what would happen to someone?
So if you really wanted to target, if you’re Nestlé, if you’re Pepsi, if you’re Unilever, right now, and you’re doing food development and you want to develop things for a pre-diabetes population or diabetes population or just generally healthy foods for healthier people, then you are able to use the digital twins and pharma can use digital twins in the way of having a third arm in their clinical trials.
Noosheen Hashemi: For example, if they wanted a population of people with diabetes or pre-diabetes and they wanted to have people where we’ve already characterized their lifestyles. And of course, this can also have a huge multiplier effect on coaching solutions.
You have Weight Watchers out there. You have new you have a model, you have all of these people couldn’t get access to doctors. So in the last ten or 15 years, coaching has become the way to get care. And it’s had and it has had good results where people can’t see the doctor frequently enough.
But maybe they can they can reach to reach their coach more. But we could have a multiplier effect for coaches because we have a biological model of the person. We actually know what’s happening in their body. Today, if you go to Weight Watchers or Noom, there are no wearables.
And I think Omada for for diabetes does use CGMs, which is terrific. And we would love to add heart rate monitors to the mix. Everybody’s wearing something these days. A lot of people are wearing smartwatches. Why don’t we make use of that data for them?
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, some of us are wearing more than more than one. Yeah, I mean, I can’t compare to Mike Snyder, but so, I mean, let’s face it. I mean, in reality, in the area of of diabetes, I mean, the system is is really failing. I mean, it’s sort of it’s affecting 80 to 90 million people.
And what I don’t understand is even if I’m being optimistic and says, you know, say somebody goes to the doctor three or four times a year to talk about metabolic health and nutrition, it doesn’t seem to be enough to move the needle because they’re not getting.
You know, real time information or getting information from their own bodies, let’s say. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s one of the needs you guys are responding to in helping fix that beyond just being healthy.
Noosheen Hashemi: Absolutely. Yeah. So, as you know, my co founder, Mike Snyder, he was able to tell that it was coming down with a cold from his Fitbit. He was able to tell that it was coming down with COVID from his Fitbit. His COVID test disagreed. So he took a trip to New York and ended up just being holed up in a room for a week.
I recently had gastroenteritis last week and I had a fever. Yes, I could see my heart rate going through the roof. I could hear my heart beating really fast and my temperature was going up. Wearables, just my Oura ring was just telling me that my temperature is elevated. This is without me even getting out of bed in the middle of the night.
I could see that my heart rate went to 90. My resting heart rate went to 90. And so, yes, these we are huge believers in the power of wearables to be informing us of our health, of our state of being.
And we want people to become in tune with their bodies, to get to know their bodies, to be to be in tune into these little blips and essentially be monitoring themselves and be in touch with themselves and get to know themselves really well. So when something goes wrong, they’re the first ones to notice. We think that it’s critically important.
Harry Glorikian: And it’s well, it’s interesting and not to and I only because I literally just saw this article, this publication, right before we got on the phone, I guess on the 15th, there was a meta study that just got published saying that anybody that had long bouts of COVID has a significant higher probability of developing diabetes.
Noosheen Hashemi: Oh, wow.
Harry Glorikian: And that was a huge meta study that just got published. So something that may, you know, really fit into, you know, your system and how it can sort of alert people or keep people sort of more in line to maybe stave that off a little bit, which I thought was interesting. And I wanted to mention when we were talking.
Noosheen Hashemi: Yes, 100%. I mean, 40% of people who died of COVID had an underlying condition, many of them diabetes. So having chronic disease and not knowing about it is serious business. You can die, as we learned with COVID. And we think that these lifestyle, chronic diseases are really manageable.
They are preventable if people are armed with information and also not just information alone. I think if you just talk at people, that doesn’t work. People need to learn things experientially. They need to see for themselves. And I think wearables help close the human behavior loop.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, no, totally agree. I mean, I know how it changes my behavior. Not all the time. Every once in a while I know that I’m breaking the rules and I’m going to suffer the consequences. But I do it with the knowledge that that’s going to happen. But so. You know, what do you think the biggest changes are at the company over the last, say, 12 to 16 months?
Noosheen Hashemi: Yeah. So we we we we basically we had great success with our V1 of the product. People had lost substantial weight. They had they were using our product, they were eating fewer carbs, they were eating more fiber, more protein, they were leveling their blood sugar in a significant way.
We put out a paper in Diabetes Therapy from our Sugar Challenge study. We have a white paper right now about the first 2000 people who used our paying product. That paper, we’re just submitting that for a peer reviewed journal. So we had really good results from from that experience. But the product was clunky.
We had used it to, essentially we had we had developed it just to collect data for our clinical trial. So we made a big decision. We made three big decisions at the end of last year, in 2021. We decided to stop investing in our V1 and sunset that product. We decided to stop paying, buying any kind of marketing and stop marketing for that product.
And we also brought our mobile development in-house that had been in Ukraine prior to this. And yes, literally days before, before the war, the last two people rolled off. So what we decided was to invest in a consumer grade product, a V2 of our product and to design it. And to have it showcase our AI more and be a product that was more consumer grade.
Noosheen Hashemi: So we spent the better part of 2022 to designing that product. And we have an Alpha that came out on August 31st and we’ve been working on changes to it and we are going to put out a beta shortly and we’re excited about sort of we’ve stripped out a lot of the features that we had.
It’s a very basic product, but one that we think does, it’s better than anything that is out there. Absolutely. We had too many. We had a million things that you could do. We had five five levers in V1.
We still have those five levers, but we had intermittent fasting, we had calorie restriction, we had fiber increase, we had movement after after eating. And we also had what we call spiking foods, reducing, getting you hyper focused on what is spiking your blood sugar and then hacking those things.
So we still have those. We have implemented them a little differently, but we stripped out social, we stripped out gamification, we stripped out everything to have a basic experience right now for people. And we will slowly add those other features over time. So that’s been the biggest thing going from V1 to V2 is the biggest change that we made.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, I saw that there was a wait list for people to sign up for. So I guess is that the wait list is for new people or is is it for the existing users?
Noosheen Hashemi: It’s for new and existing users. Yeah. We have again, we have done zero marketing, so it’s just word of mouth. We have we have no paid ads, paid social, anything and anything like that. We really, we don’t, we’re not talking very much about, about this until until it’s out.
But we just had to focus in. Our focus has always been on science and technology and AI and now we have the mobile development to go with it. So we are excited to put out V2 and get more feedback on it. We are looking forward to partnering with a number of companies that are interested in expanding this service, the January service, to their users.
Harry Glorikian: So you touched upon it earlier. And I mean, I know because of my experience in these areas that behavioral psychology is a huge, you know, aspect of these sorts of products where, you know, and I know we didn’t discuss it last time, but, you know, there’s a big difference between and even for me having information about your health and then doing something about it. Right.
What what kind of behaviors are you trying to encourage through the new app? What kind of design features are baked into the app to help customers, say, implement those shifts?
Noosheen Hashemi: Yes. So the standard, the gold standard, if you will, are these frictionless nudges. That’s the gold standard. Apple does them. Oura does them. When you first throw on an Oura ring, you’re not really sure necessarily what heart rate variability is. You don’t really know a bunch of the metrics that are tracked for you. And over time you realize that, oh, that’s what that means.
Like no one, like there are very small amount of there’s very small amount of content in there like explainers explaining what are the metrics. But no one’s like talking at you, no one’s like giving you streaks, no one’s gamified, no one’s done anything with you.
They just they just literally every day report back on your behavior and they say you may have eaten too close to your bedtime or worked out too close to your bedtime. Maybe that’s why you’re resting. Heart rate overnight was high. And after you see that a few times, you go, I was doing just that.
I did eat too late or I ate too much. Or I did. I was walking like, you know, before I immediately before I slept. That’s what my heart rates are, you realize, like, so I used to drink two or three sips of wine.
Noosheen Hashemi: Sometimes when I if I eat red meat or cheese or something like that, but I realize what it does for my resting heart rate. So I don’t do that anymore. So January is trying to do the same thing. We’re trying to do these frictionless nudges where every day we would report to you and say, “This is how much fiber you had yesterday.
This is how to increase fiber in your in your body.” Or, “Great job. You moved yesterday after your meals.” So how many times you’ve moved after post meal. And that’s what we’re trying to do. So the frictionless nudges are the gold standard. Now, could you tie this to a much bigger cognitive behavior therapy platform, like a like a Noom or some of the ones that I know are getting developed right now by other people? Absolutely. That would be the dream.
The dream is to tie essentially the best technology, the best prediction, the best biological model you could have for a person informed by wearables and their user reported data to a cognitive behavior therapy platform that would be unbeatable. It would be really good, and we look forward to partnering on that. And while we expand our own internal capabilities.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, I mean, there was an interesting opinion piece like just the other day, a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal by a journalist named James Hirsch, who I guess who has, you know, Type 1 diabetes. He’s been wearing his continuous glucose monitor for about seven years.
And he said the CGM just sends him so much data that it’s almost too much right to manage sometimes. And he feels like I don’t want to, it’s like unforgiving judgment.
I think he calls it how it, you know, cajoles and like, you know, beats him over the head of it’s too high or, you know, it’s too low or whatever. And it’s I guess there’s got to be this fine line of how much you nudge someone or give them data to without overwhelming them to make sure that they can digest it and then be able to do something with it.
Noosheen Hashemi: Yes, there’s definitely the issue of the so what? And then now what of data that is definitely giving people just raw data is not always useful. I think what’s really what people are looking for is can you connect my data together? Can you integrate, synthesize in a way that I could not have done it myself?
And that is exactly what an AI does for you. You can’t keep 24 hours data, continuous monitoring of your heart rate and your glucose, in your head. It’s not possible to do that. So we keep that for you and we’re able to call out little blips and we’re able to surface data that is important for you to notice.
And you don’t you don’t have to notice the rest of it. And I think a lot of good. Wearables and technologies around wearables do that. They try to pick out if you want to know more, you can click and learn more. But if you don’t want to know more and you just want to know kind of trend wise which way you’re headed, then these technologies do do really well.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, I mean, for someone like me, I like something that sort of points me towards an actionable direction. Right? But okay, now, since we last spoke, which seemed like a long time ago again. You and the other founders of January started a related company called Eden’s.
If I’m pronouncing it correctly, and I think that makes a nutritional supplement intended to support a healthy gut microbiome. So you and your co founder, Mike Snyder from Stanford, is also your co founder at Edens. Along with Justin Sonnenberg, if I remember correctly.
Noosheen Hashemi: Yeah. So we actually started the company together. We started five years ago together, and it was always our intention to have be able to use the power of wearables and AI to dial people’s lifestyle. But also we recognized that we couldn’t just do that with with behavior and AI, and that the biggest intervention in someone’s health is fiber.
The biggest intervention is prebiotics, food for your gut, food that doesn’t have calories for you. It’s not consumed for you. It’s not for you. It’s actually for your gut. And what’s extraordinary, like our pioneering work on the AI side, we have done the most substantial study of fibers, fiber blends in our own wet lab.
You see a lot of probiotic companies out there and they’re successful. And I take some of those products. I like those products. We’ve done that kind of work for prebiotics, which is different. Probiotics are more of the population that you can. Yes. So in fact, our product is a symbiotic.
So it’s a prebiotic probiotic and polyphenols, but it’s mostly made out of prebiotics. So it’s a blend of multiple prebiotics and there’s nothing like it in the world. It is the first product created for total metabolic health. So there are a couple of other products out there too that I can think of that promise to be nourishing your gut.
They were not created for cardiometabolic health. We were and we were also, our product comes from our own wet lab and our own proprietary assays and our studies over the years about what is going to produce beneficial short chain fatty acids for you, what’s going to be creating more GLP1 and you’re going to be more satiated, less, less interested in snacking.
So we are super excited about this product and we want to tell the world about it because it’s been in the making and we have we have a family of products like this one. The next one will come out probably mid-year in 2023, but we’re very excited about getting the word out about it right now.
Harry Glorikian: So what’s the story behind the founding of Eden. I mean, was this being done in parallel while you guys, you know?
Noosheen Hashemi: Indeed, yes, it was done in parallel. It was basically two companies under one roof all the time.
Harry Glorikian: Okay.
Noosheen Hashemi: So that creates a lot of, there are a lot of CEOs out there that run multiple companies. So. So I was I was running these two different things. One dry lab, one wet lab, one with machine learning people, one with biologists and microbiologists and so, yes, that was the story.
We really felt that as much as we would dial your food, you could not get everything you need from doing that. So, you know, according to USDA, 95% of Americans are not getting enough fiber right now. And what you know, our modern ancestral diets that we’re observing in some of the cultures that exist out there, people were eating 100 to 150 grams of fiber a day.
And Americans are getting 5 to 10 grams, maybe ten grams of fiber a day. And the difference is, you know, insane. So if you we’ve been evolved to eat certain things over millions and billions of years, and then all of a sudden there has been industrialization. And essentially evolution moves way more slowly than industrialization.
Noosheen Hashemi: And so all of a sudden, we’ve gone to these highly processed foods that don’t have enough fiber in them. And our system is, no wonder why we have so much inflammation. If you take essentially these low fiber diet, the American standard diet, which is rich in sugar, salt, fat, red meats and seed oils, if you take this diet.
And, you know, you look at that and you look at overuse of antibiotics. I mean, we have made ourselves very, very sick. And, you know, I feel we felt that the single most single lever of nutrition would be to increase prebiotics or fiber in your diet. But if you look at, for example, Metamucil, that’s just psyllium.
That’s one fiber. And it’s people generally think of it for constipation. And it’s it’s you know, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work on 30% of the people either. So. But it is we are a blend. And we’re not just a blend of probiotics and polyphenols, but we’re a blend of fiber. So you’re getting multiple fibers in one, which is really clear.
Harry Glorikian: So if you’re taking the Eden supplement — and because I haven’t, it’s the I didn’t really search up whether there’s any published papers or anything — but do you see a noticeable change in, say, glucose levels since we’re tying it back to the, you know, monitoring system?
Noosheen Hashemi: Yes, you do. You do see a difference in your glucose tolerance. We have a white rice challenge. You can take it at the beginning of the challenge and take it a month later at the end of the at the end of the challenge. And you can see that your glucose tolerance has improved dramatically.
Your bifidobacteria I think we doubled your bifido. Yes, we changed the composition of your microbiome. And by the way, I think it’s really important for those people who are not taking a a prebiotic supplement on a daily basis today. It takes more than a month for your body to adjust.
You really should give it a couple of months. And if I could put in a plug, for instance, right now, although maybe your show is not going to show, but I think I’ll just talk about the subscription. I think it’s really, really important for people to subscribe and and just stay with it.
Because if you’ve never taken a fiber supplement before on a regular basis, on a daily basis, the first month can have you know, you can get gassy, you can have all sorts of kind of interesting things that start happening when you start getting sort of cleansed and but it subsides and then it’s normal.
And I’ve been I’ve been on one one form of fiber or another for the last five years myself. I will not go a day without it. And the last two years I’ve been taking Eden’s every day and as we’ve been testing it ourselves and it’s phenomenal.
So it’s something that it’s this simple as hack, you can make one spoon, one spoon in water before when you wake up in the morning, before you eat anything, keeps you full. You can eat lunch later. It really helps your intermittent fasting because you don’t have to, you don’t have to eat.
You can stay full longer. So it’s a huge intervention in health. It’s the it’s the quickest, easiest hack. It has no side effects. You’re not taking powerful drugs. It’s a very simple way to reduce your chances of chronic disease, including diabetes.
Harry Glorikian: So but it sounds like, at least from when I was looking at the website, it’s a combination of, or at least it says a combination of the app, and the supplement constitutes a unified metabolic health platform. So I’m assuming the A.I. component trying to help you manage what you’re putting into your body besides the supplement, together, has some sort of, you know, more positive benefit than just one or the other by themselves?
Noosheen Hashemi: Definitely. We think that the answer is in both. You need to dial your diet, dial your activity, dial your lifestyle to to really optimize for your metabolic health. And a part of dialing your diet is to increase fiber in it. So they do work hand in hand. And we feel like you have the best chance.
I mean, there is tremendous amount of literature behind the impact of fiber for glycemic response. Tremendous. And there’s tremendous amount of literature in the world and including there’s a lot in China. They’ve done a lot of interesting work there. We will put up the papers on our website, that is missing from what is there.
There’s abundance of literature around generally fiber and diabetes. And then there is abundance of literature around our ingredients.
Harry Glorikian: And yeah, I’m sure that would be helpful to people as they’re trying to educate themselves on the topic.
Noosheen Hashemi: Absolutely. We have a massive spreadsheet about what has been put out in the world, what has been put out in the world about ingredients, what has been put out in the world by our own savvy scientific advisory board members.
We include people like Jeffrey Blumberg of Tufts is the polyphenols man, as well as Eric Martens of University of Michigan. He’s he’s very well known for fiber research, etc.. So and Mike Snyder put out a study on fiber not too long ago in April of this year. I don’t know if you saw that, but so it’s our own SAB members.
Of course, Justin Sonnenburg and others, our own SAB members as well as other other massive amount of research that supports the importance of fiber. Fiber in your diet for managing blood sugar.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, actually, you know, you’re reminding me I’m probably overdue to reach out to Mike again and have him on the show, because I’m sure there’s a wearables angle that has completely changed over time, too, since the last time I had him on.
Noosheen Hashemi: For sure. Yeah. Yeah, he did have a paper. There’s an article about it at Stanford and the Stanford Medicine. It says fiber supplements aren’t one size fits all study shows. And so do talk to him about fiber and about metabolic health center and a few other things that are really topical right now.
Harry Glorikian: Oh, yeah. I mean, I could talk to Mike for hours. So the last time we talked, and I tried this was you guys had this introductory program called Seasons of Me that came with the CGM, came with the app. You tried it out, but. I mean, and maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough, but I didn’t. I didn’t. I think you’ve discontinued that program this last summer.
Noosheen Hashemi: Yes. We have. That’s the V1.
Harry Glorikian: You something coming up next?
Noosheen Hashemi: That’s the V one that we’ve discontinued. So our V2 is just called January app, and that is uses one CGM only instead of two. And you basically take a few days to train your AI. Five out of seven days for seven days to train your AI and then you’re able to have virtual CGM, can tell you you can look up whatever you want, you can look up should I eat these Cheez-Its or this other thing? And then the virtual.
As long as you after the CGM runs out, as long as you log your food, you can still get predictions of your glucose all the time. It’s pretty cool. It’s kind of crazy.
Harry Glorikian: And then so but, you know, we were talking like, you know, you were saying maybe an update every quarterly or, I don’t know, at least twice a year. But how do you do you just order…
Noosheen Hashemi: Currently? Yeah. Currently, we don’t. We don’t put you on a program. We as soon as this gets out, we need to get to situations where you can just choose, send me four CGMs year or something like that, and we can just say great, every, you know, we’ll just send one to you every quarter and pause when you when you want to.
And yes, we definitely want to do that. We think that those are extremely powerful. We should update our models. So intermittent use of CGM is definitely what we recommend. There’s no way we’d recommend use one CGM for your lifetime. That would be crazy.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, well, I mean, because and you know, we’re in the United States. I mean, if we in the Europe, you could at least go to the drugstore and get a new one. But here you just there’s no way to do that.
Noosheen Hashemi: But but imagine but imagine 133 million people today have diabetes and pre-diabetes. 96 million people have pre-diabetes and 90% of them don’t know it. And 22% of people who have diabetes don’t know it. Diabetes, they’re undiagnosed.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Noosheen Hashemi: I mean 5 million people have diabetes or pre diabetes today and they have no idea. So why not take a CGM? It’s 40 $50, throw it on. Even if you don’t want to use Jan, just throw on a CGM, ask your doctor for a CGM. Try it, try it. It’s fascinating. It is really informative and it’s not meant to diagnose you or anything like that. It’s just meant to inform you. That’s it.
Harry Glorikian: I can tell you that when I go out and give talks about my book and CGM comes up, I would say more than half of the audience ask me where, what, who. That is what they’re super interested in, because it’s actionable, it’s attached to their diet and they everybody’s worried as they age, you know, could they have a propensity to become diabetic over time?
Noosheen Hashemi: One undred percent. You’ve seen what Mike’s research from five years ago, the glucotype paper that talks about how people whose A1C’s do not show pre-diabetes or diabetes but have huge blood sugar spikes. Now, there’s no long, long term studies, longitudinal studies showing that people that spike all the time will necessarily have diabetes. But the stress you’re putting on your body when you spike that much.
Harry Glorikian: Oh, yes.
Noosheen Hashemi: You know, it’s it’s it’s yeah. So he’s shown people that there’s there’s the population that has diabetes, there’s a population that has pre-diabetes, and then there’s a population doesn’t look like they have either, but they are spiking like crazy.
So I think there’s there’s beginnings of chronic disease where we’re not even we’re not not only we’re not screening for it right now. We’re not even screening today. Screening in America is if you’re an adult over 40 who is very obese, you might get screened for diabetes. That’s insane. That’s insane. The number you have. That’s just irresponsible of our of our standard of care. It’s just irresponsible.
Harry Glorikian: And the funny thing is, is, you know, like back in the day, you could say, well, you know, testing for it is not easy. But now it’s like you put the thing in your arm and you just you don’t I forget, it’s I forgot it’s there. I mean, I would be, you know, taking a shirt off or putting it on and I’d be like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot it was in my arm.
Noosheen Hashemi: Same. Same. Same. Yes. Yes. We have the technology today to help people live a healthier life. We have the supplement today to get people to nourish their gods and come back into balance, reduce inflammation, improve their cardiometabolic health.
And I think it’s they’re fairly easy hacks. They’re fairly easy hacks. This is not like don’t eat sugar again. It’s nothing like that. It’s not like don’t eat refined flour, Don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s not like drop 25 pounds. It’s not any of those things. It’s a small hack. It’s a small hack. One scoop a day. That’s it.
Harry Glorikian: Oh, yeah. No, Well, it’s funny because you’re saying give up sugar. So I just I, one of my friends went to Lebanon and said, Hey, come with me. So I went with him and I just got back Sunday and I brought back a little, you know baclava. They’re amazing. So, you know, I don’t know if I would ever want to give those up. I don’t have to have them all the time. But every once in a while they’re know.
Noosheen Hashemi: Much like you take a lactate pill before you have a bunch of cheese, have some fiber in your stomach right before you have a gut level 20 minutes before. And it will it will modulate your your it will stunt your curve.
Harry Glorikian: How. Well, it’s been great having you back on the show. I mean, it’s been almost too long, but I’m glad to hear and see all the changes that have happened and all the you know, I’ll call them improvements because that’s what a startup does is continuously improve. And, you know, I’d love to hear more as time goes on and the results of studies, because I’m sure you’re doing them. So I only wish you incredible success.
Noosheen Hashemi: Thank you, Harry. I really appreciate it. Thank you for spreading the word about the solutions that exist already today. Of all the things we already can do and the promise of all the things to come in terms of AI and medicine. We really appreciate it.
Harry Glorikian: Excellent. Thank you.
Noosheen Hashemi: Thank you. Have a great day.
Frequently asked questions about diabetes and treatment
Yes, in many cases diabetes can be prevented. Specifically type 2 diabetes, which is the most common type, is often preventable. The best way to prevent type 2 diabetes is to maintain a healthy lifestyle, which includes regular exercise and a healthy diet. This can help to keep your weight under control and prevent the development of insulin resistance, which is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
In addition, some studies have suggested that certain medications, such as metformin, can also help to prevent the development of type 2 diabetes in people at high risk. If you are concerned about your risk of developing diabetes, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor about ways you can prevent the disease.
Diabetes patients often use a variety of wearable devices to help them manage their condition. Some of the most common wearables used by people with diabetes include:
Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs): These devices are worn on the body and continuously measure a person’s blood sugar levels, providing real-time data that can help people with diabetes better manage their condition.
Insulin pumps: These devices are small, wearable pumps that deliver insulin to the body on a continuous basis, helping to regulate blood sugar levels.
Activity trackers: Many people with diabetes use activity trackers, such as fitness bands or smartwatches, to monitor their physical activity and track their daily exercise. This can help them to maintain a healthy lifestyle and better manage their diabetes.
Smart watches: Some smart watches, such as the Apple Watch, have built-in features that can be useful for people with diabetes.
Overall, there are many different types of wearable devices that can be helpful for people with diabetes, and the best device for a particular individual will depend on their specific needs and preferences.
Glossary Terms for this episode with Noosheen Hashemi
A biological model is a representation of a biological system or process that is used to understand and predict the behavior of the system or process. In the case of January.ai, a biological model of a person’s body is created to predict the body’s response to certain foods, which helps in improving the lives of diabetes patients.
Gut health refers to the overall health and functioning of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, which includes the organs that are involved in digestion, such as the stomach, small intestine, and large intestine.
Prediction models are statistical or machine learning algorithms that are used to make predictions about future outcomes based on past data. Prediction models can be used in a variety of fields, including finance, healthcare, marketing, and sports, to forecast events such as stock prices, patient outcomes, consumer behavior, and sporting results.