Introduction
Dr. Eric Westman: I have Doug Reynolds with me who has been a leader and a coworker with me in The Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners. The story starts way before with a conference he and his wife started putting on.
Where would you start? How did we come to work together? I think it’s a great story.
Doug Reynolds: For those people who haven’t heard it, this is normally where I start like when I’m doing my opening talks at the events. I start from back in the day, 2015, there abouts. I was about 51, 52, and I’d been a long distance runner. Over those last 10 years I’d started to really feel like I was taking strain. I was putting on a little bit of weight each year that I thought I was just being lazy and not running anymore or not running enough to keep it off. My knees were getting sore and I was having respiratory issues and there were all sorts of things going on. I got an email from somebody trying to sell me exogenous ketones, friendly enough. The heading of the email was “Ketones – a better source of fuel than glucose.” Being a runner and fully aware of the fact that I should be eating carbs and sugar to keep my energy up, it intrigued me.
It was exactly at that time that I had just stood on the scale and seen that I was about 35 pounds over what I considered my normal fighting weight; it was that weight that had crept on over the last few years. The email just came at the right time and I started investigating this. I didn’t even know what a ketone was. I don’t know how that’s possible, but I didn’t.
Dr. Eric Westman: You came from this through a non-medical background?
Doug Reynolds: Yeah, I was an electrical software engineer.
Dr. Eric Westman: What’s fascinating to see is that there is a group who came to this way of eating not because of a need to reverse diabetes. You had some weight to lose but you were running and were healthy – typifying another group of people who find this way of eating to be helpful. Everyone gets older and you just run less fast and you were probably just having a midlife crisis, right?
Doug Reynolds: In retrospect, I found out that I was also consuming sugar and carbohydrates.
This company was brand new. They actually had run out of product so I couldn’t even buy any if I wanted to but I spent about three weeks diving down this rabbit hole. It explained everything. It explained what I was going through at the time and even my early thirties when I was running the Comrades Marathon. It’s about 55 miles and I was really fit. I would go through Tim Noakes’s carb loading regimen three or four days before and I would be standing on the start line feeling absolutely shocking, feeling like I don’t even think I can get to the next corner let alone 55 miles up this mountain. I always used to attribute it to nerves because I had all my eggs in one basket. I’ve run way over a hundred marathons in total but most of them have been training runs for this ultra marathon each time. I wasn’t ever training for and racing these marathons. I was just running comfortably and training. It was once a year that I got to run this big race and I thought it was just nerves.
Dr. Eric Westman: Well everyone was doing my stuff. Just to clarify, Professor Tim Noakes wrote the book on how to run a marathon. He taught everyone to “carbo load.” You’d tank up your glycogen and drain your muscles. The mindset was that you needed to run on sugar all this time so you had to make sure you had plenty of it.
Doug Reynolds: Yeah. I was standing there feeling really bad and in the end I would muscle through it. I was really fit so I ended up running relatively well. I wasn’t an elite athlete and I wasn’t competitive.
Dr. Eric Westman: Most of my patients never even dreamed about running a marathon. A 5K would be a life goal. I just want to emphasize that this is an approach that can help many different types of lifestyles.
The Turnaround
Dr. Eric Westman: What made you think that maybe there was another way?
Doug Reynolds: It was really the research when I got this email. At the time, I think Low Carb Down Under had done one event and the Noakes people did one in Cape Town. A lot of what I learned about low-carb and keto came from watching the videos of those two of those two events.
After all of this research, I decided, okay, this explains all the issues that I’m having.I’m an engineer and I looked at it from an engineering point of view. When you analyze the physiology and the biochemistry, it made sense so I decided I was going to do it. But it was surreptitiously under the radar, you didn’t want to be telling anybody that you were doing it!
I was about three or four months into it and I was now really starting to see improvements. My mom and dad still lived in South Africa at the time and I used to call them every Sunday. After about three or four months of doing this I finally fessed up to them while I was on this call on a Sunday morning that this is what we were doing. My mom said to me, “That sounds like the Tim Noakes diet.” They called it banting there in South Africa. It was a huge thing. Tim Noakes was my hero. Lore of Running was like my bible, so while we were on the call, I got a laptop and was looking up banting and Tim Noakes online. That was when I first found out that he had found this and had an amazing turnaround of his type 2 diabetes. I was doing it because it made sense to me but when Tim bought into it, it was like, okay, this is real stuff.
Experiencing Rapid Improvement
Dr. Eric Westman: And you had the personal experience to back that up.
Doug Reynolds: That’s the thing that’s so amazing. When I do try to talk to people about it, I tell them, “You need to try it for a week or two weeks.” The changes are so fast. You know from your practice that the changes happen so fast, if you’ve got patients that are on medications you have to watch really carefully from the beginning and look at adjusting those almost right away.
I started to notice things almost immediately. I was doing these double martial arts training sessions twice a week, coming home and being dead, and waking up in the morning and feeling like I had to crawl to get to the restroom. Once I started doing this, within a very short time I was bouncing out of bed and going for a run in the morning. That was just phenomenal to me how the recovery time was so much more improved. I’m in my fifties now – early fifties then – and I should be slowing down but I was running and recovering from that run so much faster than I had been before. My sore knees cleared up, I had skin issues on my ears that cleared up. I was battling to breathe at night and my sinuses were always blocked up. I was breathing through my mouth all the time which was horrible – that all cleared up. I go to bed at night and I’m breathing through my nose and that’s going through the night. Those are things I wasn’t expecting when I started trying this diet.
Dr. Eric Westman: If you tell everyone everything that gets better they won’t believe you and they’ll think you’re a shill and you’re making it up but it is quite motivating to explain how fast some of that can happen.
Doug Reynolds: It is if people are in the right space and they are open to hearing that at the time. That’s over the 10 years what I’ve learned is to not try and preach it all the time. If people want to know, I’ll talk to them about it. I rather talk to the people that come to your channel and my channel and our events and the people who are open to this then I can talk to them.
Dr. Eric Westman: The initial urge to just tell everyone is common because you’re feeling so great! Unsolicited advice is rarely welcomed but a lot of people wonder how to handle their families. It was really neat that your family already knew about it because Prof Noakes was changing South Africa. For a minute there were banting restaurants.
Doug Reynolds: There’s a very famous restaurant on the top of Constantia Nek on top of this mountain that’s on the Two Oceans marathon route and the last time I went to Cape Town there were banting options on the menu. It was a pleasure to see that the population had embraced this because Tim is such an icon in that country, it’s amazing.
Initiating Keto Events
Dr. Eric Westman: What possessed you to start the meetings?
Doug Reynolds: I’d watched some of those ones at the Low Carb Down Under in Australia and the one in Cape Town. There were a couple at the time. The Metabolic Health Summit had just started, I think they had a little on in Florida and then there was Jeff Gerber’s Low Carb Denver but also with 150 people. I was sitting there, my weight was back down – that 35 pounds had come off. I was loving life again. I was running and things were good. It was my birthday and the company I was working for, all the employees had been at this restaurant and again, the first rule about fight club is don’t talk about fight club, so we were long over talking about this whole thing in front of them. They were sick of hearing it. Once they were left it was just myself and Pam there and we started talking and I was saying, “How is it that I didn’t know about this and there’s one or two little conferences around the country? We need to put a thousand people in the room.” I was saying that, pounding my fist.
I woke up the next morning and started writing to people and trying to organize it. It wasn’t even a conscious decision. I just started doing it. It’s quite an amazing thing if you think about it.
I wrote to a couple of people that I had seen in these other videos that I’d watched. Steve Phinney was one of them, Jeff Volek was one, and Gary Taubes. I looked them up; I had never been to one of these low carb meetings. I was a software engineer. I had experience putting on meetings but not in this space. I didn’t know anything. I contacted these three people and said, “Hey, what if I put on this conference in San Diego?” I thought San Diego, summer tourist destination, we’re going to put a thousand people in the room. They got back to me. Steve was a bit hesitant and in the end didn’t come that first time but he’s been to almost all our events since then. I had the wrong email address for Jeff Volek so I didn’t get a response but I found out later down the road. I wrote to him with the correct address and he ended up actually coming.
The big thing was Gary. I knew how much his time meant to him and he agreed to speak to me on the phone. I often tease him when I’m introducing him and calling him up to the stage at the meetings – it was like I’d asked to marry his daughter, it was this interrogation. But he spoke to me afterwards and said, “I’ve been invited to places where no one shows up; they still paid my fee but that’s not good optics. It’s not good for either side, so I wanted to make sure that you knew what you were doing.” By the end of this hour’s conversation he said, “Okay, if you put this thing on in San Diego, I’ll come and speak.” That was the moment. For people who are in this space they know what an icon he is. Pam was standing in the passage while I had that call which was on speaker. We put the phone down and I looked at her and said, “Wow, this thing is real, it’s happening.”
I hadn’t even started to create anything. We had no website, we had no social media presence, we had literally nothing.
Procuring Funding For the First Events
Dr. Eric Westman: You didn’t have a company to fund the events. How did that happen? Did you put up your own money?
Doug Reynolds: Yes. I thought we would get a thousand people easily. That was my naiveté. It’s way harder than anybody can imagine. If I’d known what I know now, I probably would never have done it. Not knowing was actually a blessing at the time. We ended up with massive battles and massive stress to get to a point where we actually put this event on. It was stressful.
I thought that we had a lot of experience putting on events but I realized later that the CEO of the company that we worked for did all the contract negotiations and the payments to the hotel. I wasn’t even aware of that. My job was the logistics, planning how the rooms were set up and all of that sort of stuff. I thought I knew what I was doing but in retrospect that was like Mickey Mouse stuff compared to the important things.
Dr. Eric Westman: What year was this?
Doug Reynolds: This was 2016.
The biggest thing was the deadlines that they had. From the time we signed the contract, every month we owed them some money towards this overall cost. You sign a thing that says if you don’t meet your room block minimums and your food and beverage minimums then you owe that money to them. You have to come up with the money. There was this schedule of payments. I think we managed the first one and then by the time we got to the second one we hadn’t collected enough money. We were personally financially in a hole. We just paid what we could. I told the story in my book, The Road to Metabolic Health.
About three weeks before the event (we were way behind in payments by this stage), the manager called us in – he didn’t even take us up to his office or into a little meeting room. Standing there in the lobby of the hotel he said, “You’ve signed this contract. We’re going to cancel this meeting.” Pam was in tears. I was virtually in tears as well. We’d sold tickets to people coming from all over the world and all around the country. They’re almost about to get on a plane. All the money we’ve collected we’ve given to you and you’re not gonna give that back to us if you cancel this. I said, “You can’t cancel this.” I don’t know how I persuaded him. I just said, “I’ll get a big loan, I’ll do something. We’ll get you your money but you can’t cancel this meeting.” He somehow eventually agreed to go forward with it.
Dr. Eric Westman: I’m amazed it didn’t take lawyer letters and threats of lawsuits!
Doug Reynolds: It didn’t get to that. We were in the hotel having the meeting, knowing that we were many many thousands of dollars short of what we were gonna owe the week after the meeting.
Dr. Eric Westman: And when all of the ticket pre-sales have been done, it’s not like you could bank on a hundred people coming that last day.
Doug Reynolds: No. I think we’ve done like 24 events now and it’s weird, there’s no pattern to it. One year, we had almost half our sales in the last two and a half weeks before the event so you count on that the next time. And then, we didn’t sell any tickets in the last three weeks to the same event the next year. That is so frustrating and scary because until the day of the event, you really don’t know how much money you’ve collected. That’s been the stress that Pam and I have dealt with through these years. I felt like it was time to tell people what it had been like.
Motivation for Continuing
Dr. Eric Westman: What kept you going?
Doug Reynolds: I don’t know. If I’m honest, when I first started considering this and I was saying, “Let’s put a thousand people in the room,” I was just assuming we’re gonna put a thousand people in the room. Based on that, doing the calculation, I thought we’re actually gonna come out ahead here. Things are much more expensive than people realize and then I realized until that first one. The prices that they quote all say, “Plus, plus.” At the end of it, the food and beverage minimum was $60,000. But that $60,000 plus plus, means plus a 25% service fee, plus sales tax. That effectively adds about another third onto it. At the end of the day, the $60,000 becomes almost $90,000. Those were things that we didn’t take into account.
The other thing was the cost of the AV. It’s a couple of screens, a couple of projectors and a few mics, how hard is that to do? This didn’t even include recording. This is just to display the slides. $60,000 plus, plus!!
Dr. Eric Westman: We get spoiled as doctors and health providers. We just go to meetings they’re set up and what we don’t really keep in mind is that the booths are all pharmaceutical companies who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for these things so to see you try this was just so awesome. But you’re not normal! You’re someone who did marathons and even might have liked the challenge of it and wouldn’t step down.
Becoming Movers and Shakers
Dr. Eric Westman: When did it become apparent that you were changing the world? Now you get up at a meeting and you say, “I know we’re gonna change the world.”
Doug Reynolds: That’s the reason why I kept doing it.
We were in the hotel now, the meeting’s happened, we’d just finished our first day. In the back of my mind I knew that I still owed $40,000 or whatever to get out of this in one piece. I had no idea where that money’s coming from. We had this little vendor area outside the ballroom. Everybody left after the last lecture and we had a wine tasting. I finished packing all my stuff up sitting at my desk at the back of the room and walked out through the door into this lobby area that was just humming. It was a moment I think I’ll never forget. I looked at this and thought, “I did this.”
There was so much excitement and everybody was talking about all these things they had seen throughout the day. I felt that all this stress and all of this drama was worth it; I would find the money but this was worth it.
Dr. Eric Westman: And the vibe is still there!
Doug Reynolds: It is! At every single meeting. I almost failed to describe it properly. When people ask, “Why don’t I just watch the live stream?” I try to explain it but I just never do a good job.
I understand people have financial issues, they have scheduling issues, they have children, there are all sorts of reasons why they literally can’t be there and the live stream is a decent option. It’s not just like watching the videos because Pam’s sitting at the back and everybody’s on a group chat, chatting and commenting about the talks so they get their own little little vibe going. But if there’s any way that people can find the money and find the time to come and be there, it’s life-changing for a lot of people. So many people have told me that they were on the livestream for a few years and then they came and they couldn’t believe what a difference it made.
Dr. Eric Westman: For those who don’t know, these are the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners meetings. They’re held in San Diego in the fall and Boca Raton in January in the winter. The idea is to bring together not just doctors (the majority of people are the general public) to learn about low-carb keto (LCHF).
The beginning of it really does take amazing effort. Sometimes the financial aspects were really bad yet you hung in there.
Doug Reynolds: The second one was the first one we did in Boca in January. That was a much smaller one and the layout was different. I was sitting at the registration table when I wasn’t in San Diego. This lady came up and she was talking to Pam and the other girl doing the registrations and she started crying. She was a little overweight and she was saying, “I shouldn’t be here. I’m supposed to be a health coach but look at me. I shouldn’t be telling other people what to do but my husband and my friends are trying to do this and I know it’s been helping but my family and my doctor are sabotaging me.” Pam just said to her, “You’ve paid, you are here, why don’t you just stay and listen? There’s so much information here that you can learn. Just stay.” And so she did. To watch her grow through those three days of that event was just astounding. She came to us at the end and said, “Thank you for convincing me to stay.” That’s when I realized that I didn’t want to just put on a meeting, that there’s an aspect here of supporting community that is so important.
What I also realized further down the line was it’s even more important for the practitioners and the doctors, like you. That you have a place to come where you’re not always being attacked and where you can actually talk with people and patients who are open to the conversation at the very least. From there we’ve just been committed to trying to cultivate a culture and a community of people that support each other.
Dr. Eric Westman: For a long time I resisted words like “our tribe” or “our culture” and yet the Low Carb USA, SMHP meetings had really become for me a tribe.
I could see the same people and they were growing. I was also fostering people who are brand new. I was so surprised when I went to one of those meetings and there were four people with this very rare condition called McArdle’s. It’s a glycogen storage disease that the medical world doesn’t know what to do with. They’re trying to get genetic insertion into the genes of these people. It’s just an arduous research project going on and these people fixed themselves by changing their diet from running on sugar, which the doctors said they should, to running on fat. They had to stop and pretend they were window shopping every 50 yards or so because they were exhausted and now they’re climbing mountains!
The transition of the grassroots experience to the medical world in this case was writing some case series. Their reports were put in the medical literature and then one of the people who was on fire about it who had the disease got a group in London together, the world experts on McArdle, to talk about research using low-carb and keto. She knew that there was going to be a reaction against using a high fat diet and that’s exactly what happened at that meeting. The world’s experts said, what are you talking about? She asked me to come because I would give my 30 minute, “No, actually, we’ve been using this for years and here’s the unfolding science about how what we thought wasn’t true, how you can use this.” So the meeting has put together not only people for their own personal experiences but people who are changing the medical world.
I think this is just the start. Most doctors don’t understand nutrition and the meetings that you put on and kept going through the years have been a really unique place for the tribe to get together. The dinners, to me, are just as important for the networking as the lectures themselves. Thank you so much for doing that.
Doug Reynolds: Eric, thank you as well because you tell that story, but I mean the fact that they say that they got in the literature and that had a lot to do with you. They came to us and one of the ladies lived just up the street from us and she came and we hung out with her in the buildup to the thing and so she was so excited to be able to get this group of believers to come to this meeting. We literally gave them five minutes on stage to be able to tell their story; I’d struggled to fit it into the schedule. But you latched onto that and you went to them and approached them and helped them to get this paper published.
Dr. Eric Westman: Which is a whole other skillset.
Doug Reynolds: Right! You were so affected by their story that you went to them and said you would like to help them do this. That’s the kind of thing that happens all the time at these meetings. A lot of networking and amazing things come out of those dinners and those wine tasting expo times at the end.
Dr. Eric Westman: If you’re tuning in and you have had a condition that doctors have been unable to help and through the years maybe even put on medicine for it and you’re better, let us know or better yet come to one of the meetings and you may find other people who have that kind of benefit.
I saw someone in my clinic who reversed her own gluten problem without knowing it and the doctors just missed it because it’s hard to diagnose and, god forbid, you tell someone to just not eat bread and gluten. People are fixing their medical issues by changing the food because the doctors don’t understand food or they go toward drugs.
The Answer Lies in Food
Dr. Eric Westman: What’s the byline in your book?
Doug Reynolds: “Why the answer lies in food, not pharmaceuticals.”
Dr. Eric Westman: Why have you come to this conclusion?
Doug Reynolds: Based on 10 years of research and personal experience. I’ve heard so many talks. I mean, there are times when I don’t actually hear the talk itself because there’s some fire I’m trying to put out at a meeting but we do try to listen to the videos of the talks that we missed – both Pam and myself. We’ve been exposed to so much evidence, that’s what it is. It’s not about randomized control trials. That’s the gold standard, but a lot of times it’s not even possible to do properly because of the nature of nutritional research. How do you make sure that people eat exactly what they said they ate or what you asked them to eat? It’s just really, really hard.
Yes, you can see the reversal of type two diabetes really quickly, for instance, but there’s other things – how do you show that it’s better for cardiovascular disease 40 years down the road? You’re gonna go back and look at these people assuming they’ve still been doing the same thing for 40 years and say the cardiac outcomes were better.
Dr. Eric Westman: Fortunately, we don’t have to wait that long. Just this week the long awaited study with Dr. Budoff and Dave Feldman doing the yearly CT angiograms which is the coronary artery angiograms and my take from it is that while it’s variable and not totally protective, if you’re in ketosis for a year, not much changes and some people didn’t change at all. The relationship between LDL and apoB and the disease process change was nonexistent. That’s not only protecting our tribe, if you will, but if someone comes in and says, “My doctor says I have an LDL of 300 and they fell out of their chair and they said I’m gonna die tomorrow!” we can say, “Hang on, time out.”
Doug Reynolds: What’s more and more powerful is the clinical data of people like you and Rob and there are hundreds and hundreds of doctors that I’ve worked with that now all have this data. We have doctors that are maybe not as high profile as you guys are, but they’re also having their clinical successes.
We launched the Journal of Metabolic Health not even a year ago now. A lot of the stuff that’s starting to be collated and ready to be submitted is clinical data. I think the more and more of this stuff that is published and accessible for people to search and find, I believe is going to become more powerful. It makes up for the lack of ability to do a randomized control trial in some cases and to prove where there have been controlled trials that there’s clinical data that shows that that was true.
Dr. Eric Westman: Gary Taubes says in his first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories that you have to consider if you’re studying something and it gets weaker and weaker versus if you’re studying something that gets stronger and stronger. That’s what’s happening in the low-carb world.
Genesis of the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners
Dr. Eric Westman: How did you think about having a society to bring people together? Tell me about the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners.
Doug Reynolds: In 2018, Gary suggested that we have another session where we got feedback from doctors about their experiences and trying to do this in their practice. He introduced me to Dr. Adele Hite to help mediate that. She was so excited about this and spoke to me. What came out of that session was that we needed to develop a set of clinical guidelines. We did that. She unfortunately passed away, but did such an astounding job at producing these guidelines. She did the work of ten people and on top of that, at the time when she did this, she was actually defending her PhD. It was incredible.
Dr. Eric Westman: She had worked with me at the Duke clinic. I let her teach for several years and so she saw firsthand what could happen when you change the food.
Doug Reynolds: She was totally committed to it. We published it on the Low Carb USA website and it got a lot of traction there because that was the organization I was running and that was the website we had. I had tried to create this concept of professional membership within Low Carb USA. One of the things she talks about with standard of care is that it’s about a consensus amongst practitioners with similar training and in a similar environment regarding a particular type of condition that they’re trying to treat.
At first, the Society had hardly any traction. We, I don’t know, got 20 people to sign up for it or something but we knew something like this was important and it was needed. Dr. Tro Kalayjian started talking about it at a Florida event back in 2020 before COVID. He’s part of the Low Carb MD podcast. He was talking to Pam, apparently. I didn’t even know this happened until after the event. He was saying, “We need an organization to represent us practitioners. We want to have people that recognize dietary nutritional and lifestyle treatments for metabolic conditions. So he started writing on Twitter about it after we got back from the meeting. I wrote to him and said I’m trying to do this on Low Carb USA already, we need to talk. We went backwards and forwards and eventually realized that what we needed was a proper non-profit professional organization to represent everybody.
He apparently had been telling Pam at the meeting, “I think Doug should do this.” It became my COVID baby. Because COVID just hit around that time, everything shut down. And so through the rest of that year, I basically learned how to create a non-profit which was quite tough because it was COVID; all the government employees were at home. I’ve said this a couple of times, as much as the government’s normally pretty difficult to work with, considering the situation, I was amazed at how helpful they were and how it actually kept progressing in spite of that. They were all working at home. By the end of the year, the non-profit was in place, we created the website and a board of directors of which you are one of them. It was you who came up with the name the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners. We wanted to not pigeonhole ourselves into one particular approach. approach.
Dr. Eric Westman: Science needs to be the driver, not a particular cult or one avenue. There are a lot of ways that work, like doctors with pills. You don’t just say, “There’s one blood pressure pill, another one doesn’t work.” Broadening it beyond low-carb and also including non-physicians, to me, was so important. Having worked with doctors, they prescribe pills and shots in the weight loss world and if we’re going to really make a dent, we need coaches and nutritionists and even people like Adele Hite. She had no medical background and yet with her personal experience, she was one of the best coaches and advisors I saw that firsthand. As I was trying to get people doctors involved, they’re overtrained. Although their knowledge about medication and medication reduction, de-prescribing, is invaluable and needed at times, this is a grassroots change. If there was a hurricane and disaster, you don’t get the most highly trained people to come fix the disaster, you teach people what they need to know, like relief workers. SMHP, to me, is a place where non-physicians and even non-medically trained people can have a huge impact to learn these techniques. I think this society is incredibly important as a place to be and to grow.
What Does the Future Hold?
Dr. Eric Westman: What do you see happening from here, going forward?
Doug Reynolds: When we first started doing this 10 years ago, “keto” was a bad word. Now, “ketogenic” is one of the most searched terms on Google. So much more has happened in those 10 years that more and more people know about the ketogenic diet. The misinformation out there is unfortunately equally as bad. People hear about it but they hear a lot of rubbish about it. In the beginning we were trying to convince people that it was a thing. Now, a lot more people are starting to realize that but their understanding of what that thing is is not ideal. Our mission has shifted from trying to convince people to trying to educate people.
We talked a lot on that day a couple of years ago on type one diabetes and it was so important for those people to get that message out. For so many years they’ve been ignored by the medical community that they’ve become combative and confrontational with the medical community. They feel like they’re defending themselves all of the time.
Dr. Eric Westman: The society meeting has pre courses or brings together topics and one of them was bringing together parents of people with type one diabetes. The medical backlash against the parents of type one I did not understand at all. I had no idea doctors were saying, “I’m sorry, your son is too well-controlled. You’re harming your son by having him have normal blood sugars.” That was really shocking. I’m not a pediatrician but I couldn’t believe there was so much antagonism from the diabetologists of children seeing normal blood sugars in these children because they weren’t eating carbs. I guess it’s called cognitive dissonance where you want your patient to be better but you don’t want them to do it in a way that is “harming” them. Is it harming them? No, it’s not. That happens, I’m afraid, at all levels of the medical process.
Let’s go back to how you started, which was that you just tried it for a week. That may be all you need to do if you’re just starting. But getting the right information is key.
Doug Reynolds: I think that’s where we’re going. That’s where I see the SMHP going – becoming the go-to organization. I want SMHP to be like the gold standard. If you want to go and learn the truth about this stuff then you go to that website and you look at that training and you look at the information that’s on that site and that’s what you can take to the bank. That’s my hope for this.
Dr. Eric Westman: I hope we can continue to collaborate. I don’t like the battle metaphors either but there are times when I think we’re trying to mount a fortress or get a beachhead on the soil. I think we’ve gone from the beach to a fortress, a place that’s solidified on the legitimate medical issues that we fix with nutrition being key, not pharmaceuticals.
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Speaker Bios
Eric Westman, MD, MHS, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University, the Medical Director of Adapt Your Life Academy and the founder of the Duke Keto Medicine Clinic in Durham, North Carolina. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Obesity Medicine and has a master’s degree in clinical research. As a past President of the Obesity Medicine Association and a Fellow of the Obesity Society, Dr. Westman was named “Bariatrician of the Year” for his work in advancing the field of obesity medicine. He is a best-selling author of several books relating to ketogenic diets as well as co-author on over 100 peer-reviewed publications related to ketogenic diets, type 2 diabetes, obesity, smoking cessation, and more. He is an internationally recognized expert on the therapeutic use of dietary carbohydrate restriction and has helped thousands of people in his clinic and far beyond, by way of his famous “Page 4” food list.
Doug Reynolds
Doug Reynolds, MHP, is the bestselling author of The Road to Metabolic Health, the founder and CEO of LowCarbUSA®, and President of the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners (SMHP™). LowCarbUSA provides a platform for internationally renowned scientists and medical practitioners to present new research on the benefits of dietary carbohydrate restriction. The SMHP is the home of the Clinical Guidelines for Therapeutic Carbohydrate Reduction (TCR) and defines numerous pathways for accreditation. The SMHP has also launched the Journal of Metabolic Health, which features peer-reviewed papers supporting TCR and other metabolic interventions. Doug collaborated with many other keto diet authorities in crafting the SMHP position statement on TCR for type 1 diabetes.
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