About This Blog

Written By

Updated: 06/07/2023

Published: 09/26/2020

What is this site?

Metabolic Insights is the blog produced by the editorial team at Levels, a health-tech company focused on solving the metabolic health crisis.

What can I learn here?

Unlike many company blogs, our goal here is not to convince you that you need our product or to find 10 ways to tell you how amazing we are.

The sole purpose of this site is to help you learn three things:

Metabolic health is a thing.
It matters.
And you can do something about it.

This blog is dedicated entirely to education. Why? Because we cannot achieve our mission of reversing the metabolic health crisis without it.

The articles you find here are backed by primary research. They are written by science journalists, fact-checked, and reviewed by outside experts. They aim for intellectual honesty, nuanced reporting, and clear descriptions of the physiology at work. If the science about a topic is inconclusive, we’ll tell you as much. If the best research so far is in mouse models or cell lines or in studies only of people with diabetes, we’ll tell you as much.

But we’ll also try to synthesize what we’ve learned and provide you with practical guidance you can use.

What’s important to us is that you understand how your body makes and uses energy (that’s all metabolism is!), how diet and lifestyle choices (sleep, stress, exercise) impact those processes in your body, and how your health can suffer when your body isn’t able to make and use energy efficiently. (In short, it damages your cells, and depending on where that damage is, it can manifest in chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, or Alzheimer’s and conditions like brain fog, erectile dysfunction, increased cardiovascular risk, and more.)

But we also want you to understand that you are largely in control of your metabolic health.

What we won’t do is tell you why you need to wear a CGM or buy a Levels membership.

There are many, many ways you can improve your metabolic health—and, therefore, your overall health—without our product. You can make healthier decisions at the grocery store. You can exercise after meals. You can work to reduce stress. You can try to get more and better sleep. We’ll share everything we learn in our reporting about how to do those things and how those changes can impact your body.

Learn more:

Inside Levels

What Levels does—and why

The Levels Team

Great! Where should I start?

We have articles about what to eat, why exercise matters, and lots more, but these five articles will give you the best overview of metabolic health and how it impacts your body.

Don’t feel like reading? Check out our podcast, A Whole New Level, or listen to our chief medical officer, Dr. Casey Means, explain metabolic health and why it matters.

I thought I saw some articles about Levels?

You did! Along with the education topics above, we have a separate section of the site called Inside Levels, where we keep all our company- and product-focused articles. We talk about how we work here at Levels (which is pretty unique as we’re a fully remote, async company). We talk about our product and CGMs and why they might be useful. And we also tell member stories. We do that because sticking a thing on your arm to monitor your blood sugar 24/7 is a new and slightly weird experience for most people. So we like to ask people why they did it and what they learned to help anyone else thinking about doing it.

By sequestering these articles in this section, you can trust that anything else is squarely focused on education and not trying to sell you anything.

Can I nerd out even more on your content strategy?

We’re so glad you asked. Here are some podcasts and articles about why we do what we do.

Articles:

An argument for investing in quality editorial over cheap content — and why the difference matters

7 Things I learned about launching an editorial operation at my start-up — with little experience

Podcasts:

Building a Content Machine, Pt 1

Building a Content Machine, Pt 2

Do you take article submissions?

No, we don’t. Our editorial team assigns all our articles to professional science journalists. If that describes you, find us on LinkedIn and send us samples of your work.