The Gradient Podcast - Vivek Natarajan: Towards Biomedical AI [3feebf]

The Ideal Blood Sugar Range for Non-Diabetics: A Guide to Healthy Living

Maintaining a healthy blood sugar level is essential for overall well-being, even if you don't have diabetes. When it comes to the ideal blood sugar range for non-diabetics, understanding what constitutes "normal" can be tricky.

The Normal Blood Sugar Range: What's Considered Acceptable?

For adults with no underlying health conditions, a normal fasting blood glucose level is typically between 70-99 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). However, for non-diabetics who experience symptoms or have risk factors such as obesity or family history of diabetes, their doctor may recommend slightly different ranges.

The Importance of Blood Sugar Monitoring

Monitoring your blood sugar levels regularly can provide valuable insights into how various foods and activities impact your body. While it's not necessary to track every meal and snack, keeping a blood sugar increases at night record can help you identify patterns and make informed decisions about maintaining healthy blood sugar levels.

For example, using a glucometer or continuous glucose monitor (CGM) can show how different carbohydrates affect blood sugar spikes and dips over time. Some people even use blood sugar first thing in the morning mobile apps to log their food intake, exercise routines, and symptoms in conjunction with monitoring their blood sugar levels for an added layer of understanding.

Stabilizing Blood Sugar Levels Through Nutrition

Certain foods have been shown to help stabilize blood glucose levels by slowing its release into the bloodstream. Examples include whole grains like quinoa or brown rice; non-starchy vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, and spinach; lean proteins including poultry, fish, and legumes; and healthy fats found in avocados, nuts, seeds.

On the other hand, consuming excessive amounts of refined carbohydrates – especially those containing added sugars – can cause significant spikes. Examples include white bread, sugary snacks like candy or baked goods made with granulated sugar.

Why Exercise Matters: The Relationship Between Physical Activity and Blood Sugar

Regular exercise is crucial for maintaining healthy blood glucose levels due to its impact on insulin sensitivity and overall metabolism. Regular physical activity has been linked to reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even some forms of cancer.

However, it's essential not overdo exercising with high-intensity activities too frequently without giving your body adequate time for recovery periods or sufficient rest between bouts.

Understanding the Role of Stress in Blood Sugar Regulation

Stress is another significant factor influencing blood sugar levels. High levels of stress hormones like cortisol can cause spikes followed by insulin resistance issues that might develop over long-term exposure to persistent chronic conditions due their strong potential influence affecting individual physiological state across various internal organ functions working interrelated within human anatomy system overall maintaining healthy range balance equilibrium necessary living quality lifestyle choice everyday.

When faced with a stressful situation, your body releases the hormone cortisol, which raises blood sugar levels. In turn, insulin resistance develops as an adaptation mechanism to combat this increase – but unfortunately also contributes long-term negative effects associated directly linked primarily increased risk diseases such type II diabetes obesity related cardiovascular conditions among others if kept unmanaged.

Blood Sugar and Sleep: The Connection You Never Knew Existed

Lastly, sleep deprivation has far-reaching impacts on various bodily functions including the control of blood sugar levels. Research indicates that chronic poor-quality rest affects glucose tolerance leading potentially higher fasting blood-glucose levels after meal consumption impacting negatively body's ability regulate insulin efficiently manage energy stored throughout different cells thus maintaining homeostasis crucial human health survival life quality enhancing overall wellness promoting better outcomes numerous disease conditions associated unhealthy lifestyle patterns practices contributing risk can high blood sugar cause weakness long term impact wellbeing.

Episode 126 I spoke with Vivek Natarajan ( about: * Improving access to medical knowledge with AI * How an LLM for medicine should behave * Aspects of training Med-PaLM and AMIE * How to facilitate appropriate amounts of trust in users of medical AI systems Vivek Natarajan is a Research Scientist at Google Health AI advancing biomedical AI to help scale world class healthcare to everyone. Vivek is particularly interested in building large language models and multimodal foundation models for biomedical applications and leads the Google Brain moonshot behind Med-PaLM, Google's flagship medical large language model. Med-PaLM has been featured in The Scientific American, The Economist, STAT News, CNBC, Forbes, New Scientist among others. I spend a lot of time on this podcast—if you like my work, you can support me on Patreon ( :) Reach me at [email protected] for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts ( | Spotify ( | Pocket Casts ( | RSS ( The Gradient on Twitter ( Outline: * (00:00) Intro * (00:35) The concept of an “AI doctor” * (06:54) Accessibility to medical expertise * (10:31) Enabling doctors to do better/different work * (14:35) Med-PaLM * (15:30) Instruction tuning, desirable traits in LLMs for medicine * (23:41) Axes for evaluation of medical QA systems * (30:03) Medical LLMs and scientific consensus * (35:32) Demographic data and patient interventions * (40:14) Data contamination in Med-PaLM * (42:45) Grounded claims about capabilities * (45:48) Building trust * (50:54) Genetic Discovery enabled by a LLM * (51:33) Novel hypotheses in genetic discovery * (57:10) Levels of abstraction for hypotheses * (1:01:10) Directions for continued progress * (1:03:05) Conversational Diagnostic AI * (1:03:30) Objective Structures Clinical Examination as an evaluative framework * (1:09:08) Relative importance of different types of data * (1:13:52) Self-play — conversational dispositions and handling patients * (1:16:41) Chain of reasoning and information retention * (1:20:00) Performance in different areas of medical expertise * (1:22:35) Towards accurate differential diagnosis * (1:31:40) Feedback mechanisms and expertise, disagreement among clinicians * (1:35:26) Studying trust, user interfaces * (1:38:08) Self-trust in using medical AI models * (1:41:39) UI for medical AI systems * (1:43:50) Model reasoning in complex scenarios * (1:46:33) Prompting * (1:48:41) Future outlooks * (1:54:53) Outro Links: * Vivek’s Twitter ( and homepage ( * Papers * Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with LLMs ( (2023) * LLMs encode clinical knowledge ( (2023) * Towards Generalist Biomedical AI ( (2024) * AMIE ( * Genetic Discovery enabled by a LLM ( (2023) Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe ( Episode link: (video made with