Baseline participant characteristics.

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) in healthy adults is becoming part of healthy lifestyle activities for preventing cardio-vascular and metabolic diseases. However, there is a lack in describing individual glucose responses to everyday situations, with appropriate metrics. The aim of this study was to provide metrics which describe individual glucose responses to lifestyle factors including diet, exercise, and stress in healthy, young adults. Ten participants wore a CGM device (FreeStyle Libre3®) for 14 consecutive days while completing nine standardized interventions (challenges) consisting of food, anaerobic and aerobic sport, and the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) in an exploratory, clinical trial. Individual glucose responses after each challenge were assessed over four hours, using the following metrics: AUC0–4, max glucose, time to max glucose, glucose excursion, and time required for glucose levels to return to baseline (Glucose Recovery Time to Baseline (GRTB)). The study has been registered in the German clinical trial registry (Study number: DRKS00032821). Anaerobic exercise resulted in a significantly greater glucose excursion (28.7 ± 21.46 mg/dL) compared to aerobic exercise (8.8 ± 4.91 mg/dL, p = 0.0228). Food with a rich carbohydrate content caused the highest glucose increase (161.4 ± 15.59 mg/dL). TSST resulted in a significant difference in baseline-corrected glucose concentrations over time as revealed by a two-factor repeated measures ANOVA (p = 0.0113). We provide reference data of glucose response to lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise in healthy adults. Psychobiological stress revealed a substantial glucose response. Using GRTB metrics may quantify the lifestyle stimulus on the important metabolic pathway and can be utilized alongside kinetic metrics for describing individual glucose responses.