post meta always saved as string

Hi, thanks for a great plugin. I’m having an issue where when changing post meta that is a binary 0/1 (I presume this would also be the case for any number), the meta gets automatically changed to a string. So say I have a post with example_meta = 0, and I change it to 1, it will in fact get saved as the string ‘1’. Is there a way around that?

thanks