Measurement of blood glucose concentration is central to the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes. Although there are large numbers of historic glucose measurements in individuals with diabetes, until recently there have been very few data sets that were recorded continuously or sampled frequently enough to reveal intrinsic blood glucose dynamics, or the change in blood glucose with time. There have even fewer such recordings from individuals not having diabetes to serve as a therapeutic target. As a result, blood glucose dynamics have generally not been used in the diagnosis or treatment of the disease. Although present blood glucose monitoring is based largely on discrete measurements, future monitoring will likely focus on analysis of blood glucose excursions. New measurements are now being obtained, and there is a need for new methods of analysis to extract the maximal information from the data. Several approaches are demonstrated here for characterization of blood glucose dynamics, and a patient profiling system is proposed. An example of new insights is the observation that there are four time scales of blood glucose variations in individuals without diabetes, and these time scales are modified or lost in diabetes.