Professor Javier Gonzalez, who led the research, noted that for people with good glucose control the devices “can be misleading”, potentially prompting needless food restriction. A 2024 review of the evidence urged that commercial claims about CGM use in people without diabetes “be labelled as misleading”.
Some clinicians have even adopted a term for the resulting data fixation: glucorexia, whereby those who obsessively use glucose monitoring devices, as non-diabetics, are at risk of making unnecessary or overly strict diet and lifestyle changes.
The UAE has one of the world’s highest diabetes rates, with the International Diabetes Federation estimating adult prevalence at 20.7%. That makes the region fertile ground for consumer metabolic tracking products, which are increasingly being marketed beyond diabetic populations and into the broader wellness market.
Against that backdrop, it was perhaps inevitable that consumer glucose tracking would arrive in the Gulf wellness economy too. Over-the-counter CGMs have recently become available through private clinics and metabolic health providers in the UAE, bringing a device once confined to endocrinology departments into the quantified-self mainstream.
“For people without diabetes, it’s a health-tracking wearable, not a diagnostic tool,” says Hala Zakaria, Innovation, Research and Operations Manager at Metabolic.health Dubai, which offers over-the-counter Dexcom G7.. For those without a diagnosis, she says the clinic generally reserves CGMs for structured weight-management programmes, strong family histories of metabolic disease or specific questions about lifestyle and blood sugar responses.
“The honest truth about wearables is that most people don’t know what to do with the data,” she adds. “They see a number, maybe worry about it, and nothing changes.”
And there is a defensible use case at the margins. Endocrinologists suggest that the devices can help people with prediabetes (which is no small cohort in the UAE) see, in real time, what lowers blood sugar or what sends it climbing. But whilst such devices can tell you about patterns, they are not themselves diagnostic tools. Research also suggests that in some regions of the Middle East, the adoption of modern diabetes technology is still critically low. And in markets like the UK, many diabetics still struggle to get these devices covered or funded.
The issue at hand, perhaps, isn’t just about who gets the hardware. Wellness culture has decided more information is always a virtue – even when you don’t need it, and even when the meaning of those numbers is less clear than advertised.