I decided to take dieting the data science way and went out and got myself a blood sugar monitor, a One Touch Ultra Mini. Since some of my friends have been using One Touch for more than 10 years and really trust the brand, so I started to take tests without actually checking for the precision/error range of the equipment.

Definitely not the smart thing to do. In less than a week, I found something is seriously wrong with the readings I got. It started with one morning that I felt hungry only 3 hours after breakfast and decided to give my blood sugar a test.

The first number came out is 101, which was very suspicious. So my scientific training kicked in, and within 5 minutes, I took 6 readings from the tip of the same finger and got the following vastly different range of numbers:

10:52am 101
10:53am 88
10:55am 97
10:56am 96
10:57am 106
10:57am 95

The mean is 97.17, and the Standard deviation is only 5.52. Not that bad, LifeScan might argue. But the problem is that the monitor is one-reading only device. The range of the readings here is almost 18. If the number is 78, is number in the normal range as it suggested, or it could be 67 or 89? The first would mean the person is definitely going into hyperglycemia.

One the other hand, if the reading is 94, that number would mean that the person’s blood sugar is within the normal range, but adding the errors, the truth could be somewhere around 105, means he or she is definitely pre-diabetic.

By the law of large numbers, it is more likely that what I got is a normal blood sugar monitor than by the 0.1% almost negligible chance, it is a faulty one that skipped through all those supposed quality checks. So the conclusion we can draw here, is that, these blood sugar tests are extremely inaccurate.

Giving the amount of money that the health care system is spending on these test strips and monitors, I would rather say, that it is just a damn rip off by those pharmaceutical companies on the American public and the rest of the world.