A preliminary investigation to advance personalized nutrition strategies for athletes

Use of Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) is very widespread and well understood especially for the diabetic patients. However, new applications of CGM are being tested and are currently in use on a select part of the population, which are the athletes. The objective of this preliminary investigation was to monitor the implications of different forms of carbohydrates (CHOs) supplements (gel form versus solid form) on glucose levels of cyclists. Preliminary results of two male athletes (athlete "33385" age 22 and "76767" 49 years, respectively) are report in the current paper. Two cycling workouts were conducted outdoor by each cyclist at moderate intensity (~56-70% of Functional Threshold Power) for 3 hours. Gel CHOs supplementation was tested in one workout session, solid CHOs were tested in the other one. Mean glycemia levels were within the expected normoglycemic range during exercise in all the sessions for both cyclists (mean 138 mg/dL and 123 mg/dL, gel and solid "33385" athlete’s section; mean 131 mg/dL and 110 mg/dL, gel and solid "76767" athlete’s section). Despite this a rapid increase in glycemia levels, followed by a drop was noted within the ingestion of the gel supplementation for both athletes (second gel ingestion for "33385", third, fourth and fifth ingestion for "76767"). This could be explained by high training power that could have contributed to the rapid fall of glycemia, as exercise is known to increase blood glucose level and induce hyperglycaemia and hyperinsulinemia. Based on the preliminary results of this study, the application of CGM in healthy athletes is potentially recommended to counteract hyperglycaemia and hypoglycaemia excursions. However, we believe that collection of other parameters such as heart rate, body temperature, speed, altitude may significantly improve CGM data usefulness. To this regard, technological innovation and advancement will further optimize the performance of CGM systems. Indeed, with the development of engineering, materials science, chemistry, computer science, wearable technology and the implementation of artificial intelligence will make a significant advance in the aspect of digital quantification of daily health to reach personalized nutrition.