034-Doug Reynolds: Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners
The SMHP is a non-profit for practitioners focused on metabolic health and they have a panel of advisors to oversee the creation and maintenance of a set of ‘Clinical Guidelines for Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction’. The SMHP also helps to establish Standard of Care around carbohydrate restriction.
LowCarbUSA provides a platform for scientists and medical practitioners to present the ever-increasing body of evidence on the benefits of reducing carbohydrates in the diet and adding in healthy fats. It has now evolved into one of the primary resources for the low carb community.
Low Carb Boca 2022 (Jan 14 -16)
Metabolic Health Conference at The Boca Raton Marriott Hotel
#longevity #wellness #Ketones #lifestylemedicine #younger #ketosis #biohacking #acetone #RobertLufkinMD #metabolichealth #dougreynolds #societyofmetabolichealthpractitioners #lowcarbusa
*** CONNECT WITH ROBERT LUFKIN MD ON SOCIAL MEDIA ***
Web: https://robertlufkinmd.com/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/robertlufkinmd
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/RobertLufkinMD
*** GOT A SUGGESTION FOR A SHOW? ***
Contact us at: https://robertlufkinmd.com/contact
*** SPONSORSHIPS & BRANDS ***
We do work with sponsors and brands. If you are interested in working with us for your health industry product or service, please contact us at: https://robertlufkinmd.com/contact
NOTE: This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have seen here.
Robert Lufkin MD may at any time and at its sole discretion change or replace the information available on this channel. To the extent permitted by mandatory law, Robert Lufkin MD shall not be liable for any direct, incidental, consequential, indirect or punitive damages arising out of access to or use of any content available on this channel, including viruses, regardless of the accuracy or completeness of any such content.
Disclaimer: We are ambassadors or affiliates for many of the brands we reference on the channel.
Robert Lufkin 0:00
Welcome back to the health longevity Secret show and I’m your host, Dr. Robert Lufkin. Therapeutic carbohydrate restriction is no longer a fringe practice and is now increasingly recognized for its value in diabetes, obesity, neuro degenerative disease, stroke, heart disease, and even some cancers, clinical guidelines and a standard of care about the practice will help accelerate this change. Doug Reynolds is the founder and CEO of low carb USA, and president of the Society of metabolic health practitioners. Low Carb USA provides a platform for scientists and medical practitioners to present the ever increasing body of evidence on the benefits of reducing carbohydrates in the diet. It has now evolved into one of the primary resources for the low carb community. The Society for Metabolic health practitioners is nonprofit for practitioners focused on metabolic health. They have a panel of advisors, which oversee and maintain the creation of a set of guidelines for therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, and also help establish standard of care around carbohydrate restriction. And now, please welcome Doug Reynolds.
Hi, Doug, welcome to the show.
Doug Reynolds 1:22
Hey, Rob, very much for having me. I’m
Robert Lufkin 1:25
so excited to spend this time with you and talk about so many interesting things. I think you and I share a common vision of educating people about the importance of metabolic health and and its overall value. But before we dive into that, perhaps you could take a moment and set the stage and tell us how you how you came to the come. involved with such a fascinating area?
Doug Reynolds 1:58
Yeah, well, you know, I think that that started out, basically, I was a distance runner, I wasn’t an elite athlete, but I, I was pretty good. You know, when the ultra marathon in South Africa called the comrades marathon, I finished in the top 100 A couple of times out of a field of 14 15,000. But I was still, I don’t know, two and a half hours or something. But I’m the behind the winner. So I’m not an elite guy, but but pretty decent athlete. And as always, as when I’m in my 30s, I could, you know, I could eat whatever I wanted. And that was felt like I was bulletproof. But as I started to get older, mid 40s, or whatever, I started putting on weight, you know, like each year, we put on a couple of pounds, almost like you didn’t notice it. But it never came off no matter how much I ran. And I got it, I got a fright one day I got on the scale. And it was like 35 pounds or so of my, what I call my fighting weight, the weight that I used to be like, all the time without struggling. And I was horrible. And it was it was amazing. Like literally a couple of days later, I got an email from someone actually tried to sell me exogenous ketones. And the subject was ketones, an alternative fuel source of fuel to glucose. And I was just at the right time for me. And so I started investigating it. I didn’t even know what a ketone was. I was 51 years old, I did not know what a ketone was. And by started that, for about three weeks, I dropped everything. And I basically dove into this tonight, and I was studying it. And at the end of the time, I mean, this was a brand new company that these guys were trying to push on me and they even run out of product. So I couldn’t even order it if I wanted to. But I’d learned so much about it. And I was thinking like surely like doing this naturally is better anyway. And so I pulled the trigger, and I drag Pam to the to the store which horrified her and she was even more horrified that I had a list. And you know, we walked around and I started putting all this stuff in a basket that was like freaking out you know, all have fatty feet, meat and full cream yogurt and all the stuff that we obviously avoided like the plague before and I still even remember the very first thing I did was a couple of ribeye steaks that I went outside and cooked on a fire and I came back in. I was so used to the meat that I used to eat and I had this fatty big fatty steak on my plate and it was literally flat Fat, like swishing around in the bottom of the plate. And I started giggling, like, it was like, am I seriously going to eat this thing you know. But I believe what I’ve learned from all this scientific information that I’ve consumed over the last three weeks, and and so I went to hit and I literally had to gag it down. And I was like, programmed my brain so much against fat that literally, I had this gag reflex. And, but like, I got halfway. And I was like, wait a minute, this actually tastes pretty good, you know. And I don’t I don’t think I’ve ever looked back since then, you know, I, we learned as we went along, and over five months, I lost the 35 pounds that I that I put on an A but a bunch of other conditions that I had respiratory conditions, and, you know, some skin conditions and all sorts of little things, pain in my knees. That was it. So even if I wasn’t running, that cleared up completely. And I started really enjoying running again. And I was I got back on the road. And I wasn’t hating life anymore. Because I wasn’t overweight, and I didn’t have painful needs. I could breathe better. It was it was just incredible. And beginning of in January 2016, it was my birthday. And we’d been out with friends from work. And we’re talking about keto with them. Because I was so sick of hearing it. They didn’t want to hear it anymore. But once they’d all if Pam and I was sitting man, we obviously there’s like nothing else to talk about, like except either, right?
And now we’re thinking like, how is it? I didn’t know about this? I don’t even know I Keaton was, as I said, so I can reach the age of 51 and not even know about this. And there’s obviously a lot of people out there like me. And so how can we help. And that was that was where it all started. You know, I mean, we I got up the next morning, we the work that we were in I had one of the things that we did was put on these big conferences. So I knew how to put on a conference when they were all these conferences are not all of these a couple of conferences around the country, but they were all really small at that time. And I thought I was planning my fits and saying depend we need to put 1000 people in the room, not 100 And so I started the next day I started writing to a couple of people. And I had never been to Lockhart conference. I didn’t know anybody in the space. And I wrote to a few people Jemima Gary Taubes, Steve Finney, and Jeff, folic. I think we were the first folk that people are writing. I thought if I can get a core of well known speakers and get something to build on, Jimmy got back to me within like 10 minutes and said, Can I help you? And I said, Well, I don’t know anybody. So he introduced me to a bunch of the other people on the speaking circuit. And most of them agreed, said, yeah, if you put it on, we’ll come in. And Steve Finney didn’t know who I was, and kind of said, Don’t you want to rather put your money into some research or something like that? Well, I don’t have any money. But Jeff, eventually agreed to come. But the turning was Gary Taubes. And he, you know, I mean, I found all of them just by looking them up on the website and filling in the contact us form thing. And I went backwards and forwards with Gary a couple of times, and just fill me out, you know. And eventually, he asked if I could have a phone call with him. And I was sitting on the phone with him very aware of how much he charged for for his time. And it was like, I always tease him when I introduced him and to come up on the stage at him and say, like, he was like, at Austin, marry his daughter or something. It was like you’d like Inquisition? No. But he told me afterwards, like he’d literally been invited to, to go and speak at places where they agreed to and did Peggy’s fee. But there was only a handful of people at the event, you know, and he just wanted to make sure that I knew what I was doing. And so, at the end of it, he said, Okay, if you put this on, I will, I’ll come and speak. And I put down the phone and Pam It was a head on speaker and Pam was kind of standing in the corridor like listening. And I put the phone down and I looked at her and I said shit, like, this is for real now, you know. And that was, I think the turning point for me, like, the fact that I had that conversation with him that he believed in me and what I was trying to do enough to say, Okay, if you get this going, well, I’ll come and be a part of it. Yeah, I mean, I had to establish a website, a social media presence. We had nothing. And
Robert Lufkin 10:34
Gary, the theory, such an amazing person, just one note, I mean, if you haven’t if listeners or audience hasn’t read any of his books, we’ve heard many of the speakers in this program talk about Gary Taubes. What amazing guy is I, I was lucky enough to I’ve known Gary for about 30 years, we go way back. And even he, I have to admit, he’s probably one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. And in his books, no matter what the subject are, and lately, they’ve been right on metabolic health for the last 1020 years or so. But he’s just such a great writer. And then beyond that, like you say, he is a great human being, he’s just really a really nice guy. So yeah, he’s been Yeah, he’s
Doug Reynolds 11:21
been so supportive of us, you know, and, and that, really, that was where we got the confidence to say, Wow, that we can we can actually make this happen. No. But as I said, we had nothing. And so we put that on in six months, from 050, say, from zero to hero, but not so much hero but, but from zero from nothing to having an event. We didn’t put 1000 people in there we had, but we got like 350 or something. And people I say people, I took me out off the ledge a bit disappointed that we didn’t get what we were aiming for. But at the same time, if you compare it to what we had was around at the time, it was way bigger than anything else at a better, better gun before us. And everybody that came was just so excited. And they will say like, when’s the next one? You know? And I was like, nah, this this, was it like we were going to put on a conference? And there’s no, no, when’s the next one? So I literally stayed up the whole way through Saturday night of that conference, creating a quick event page on our website for the and I basically gave people a week from that Sunday, to sign up again, for half price site don’t seem right. We don’t know who the speakers are gonna be. But just on the faith that we do as good a job as we did this time or better, hopefully. Yeah, we sold like 84 tickets or something. And that actually helped us do, you know, to pay the bills for that, that were started standing for to put up that first event. And then people asked us to come to Florida and East Coast and all that kind of stuff. So in the end, in the January, the following year, we put on, we put on one in Florida. And now this last one that we did in San Diego was I think, our 15th conference or something we’ve done one in in Jakarta and Indonesia. Took a few speakers over there, which is an amazing experience. And yeah, I mean, that’s how low carb USA came came to be is
Robert Lufkin 13:38
because it’s such a fantastic conference if if our anyone in our audience hasn’t hasn’t tried it yet. Definitely look at your calendar. I enjoyed the San Diego conference. It and and all the speakers are first class and it’s just but above and beyond the speakers. It’s a great social environment. It’s a great way to meet people. It’s kind of a community you feel like you’ve found your home sort of but you do you do a great job on that. And what what are the upcoming ones that are currently on the schedule? Now, right,
Doug Reynolds 14:18
so we have a 14th to the 16th of January is the one in bucker at all. And then the next San Diego one is a forget, I think it’s the 25th to the 28th of August last week, last weekend in August is that that’s like our flagship event. It’s it’s longer it’s four days instead of three days and we normally have more breakout talks and bigger Expo and stuff like that but the San Diego the Florida one is always nice because it’s a little smaller, but it’s much, much more intimate and people get it chance to, like everybody comes to dinner. It’s not like an add on. And, you know, folks get the chance to sit with the speakers and chat with them in a more informal environment. And it’s a, it’s just a really cool vibe that always comes out of the out of the Florida one. And it was actually there that, that that whole concept of community kind of became, we became aware of how important that was. In I, because it was, I’ve done it before, and it was much smaller. And the expo was like, right outside the hall itself. So I was sitting working, and that was still setting up. And some people were coming in to register, I was sitting on the end of the registration table, but I could I honestly look up and smell the roses kind of thing. I was listening to the conversations of people how excited they were to be there. And, you know, the one goal was literally in tears, saying, like, I’m a health coach, and this is what I’m but I’m trying to do this for my own health, my doctors are telling me, I’m gonna kill myself, my friends are, you know, a lot of them not even speaking to me anymore. And I shouldn’t even be here. Because I look at me, I’m still overweight, and I’m supposed to be teaching people to lose weight. And Pam said, Nah, man, like, just come and stay and see what you know, learn from these people. And we just noticed her growth through that weekend. And she left like, so inspired to God there. And, and help people again, and she said, You know, it’s like, it’s like, I got my family and I can, I can talk to people about the problems I’m having, and why I’m not losing that last bit of weight, and whatever, and I’m not getting shouted out and being told that I need to stop doing this, because I’m going to kill myself, you know. And that was when I realized like, this, the community part of it was so important for people to have a safe place to come to come to, to be able to, to learn about it and talk about it, without fear of judgment and, and threatened violence, almost, that’s how, you know, like, they, they, they felt solid, and then it became even more aware of the fact that the doctors needed it even more than than then the patients, you know, that they, that they themselves were out in the wilderness, because they couldn’t go and talk about they go to their local organization meeting, annual meeting or whatever, like that, and they might be the only one there that is practicing this way. And they can’t talk about it, because they get sometimes even in trouble, you know, for, for talking about the fact that this is what they’re advocating for some of their patients when it’s when it’s appropriate. And so it’s really cool for them to have a place where they can come and talk about it with their, with their colleagues, and, and loan and, you know, have a whole weekend of stuff where it’s, it’s appropriate to their way of practicing. They go to any of their other meetings, and they’re not learning about metabolic health and lifestyle interventions, as opposed to medication, they go to all these other things. And it’s all about the medications that can help all these chronic diseases that they’re trying to find, you know. So yeah, it became more and more important to us to cultivate that community, that sense of community and created a place where people could be safe. I think that’s so that was now.
Robert Lufkin 19:06
Yeah, that that. That’s amazing. We’ll put all the links to the show notes there. As you were talking, well, we’ll have all the shows that links down there have all the information but because it, it, it’s so important to have that place where information can get out where people can get things because like you say, at the sort of professional, so many of the medical meetings, they’re funded and driven by big pharma unlimited amounts of money from the pharmaceutical industry and, and other you know, another special interest in the food industry is as well as this space. The interesting thing about this, I mean, we’ve talked about this in some of the other presentations, but I can write a prescription for insulin in about, you know, a minute or two in my office. But for me to explain a lifestyle change that will accomplish the same thing for the patient and not require them to get the insulin, if it can take 20 minutes or even longer, and the point is it won’t cost them anything. And there’s no there’s no drug company that’s going to benefit from it. So all the incentives are aligned towards, sadly towards prescribing drugs and, and or surgery and this sort of thing. And the beautiful thing about lifestyle and metabolic health is that it can be done at low cost for the patient, but the but the, the thing we’re facing is that it’s hard to get wealthy, wealthy interests that necessarily will sponsor that thinking, you know, Coca Cola sponsors, the Olympics, what’s that a sugar drink for athletes, but yeah, you know, billions, millions of dollars.
Doug Reynolds 21:02
But I mean, that’s, you know, that’s especially distance athletes. I mean, that’s what you grew up on you. You believe that that’s what you need to drink in order to be able to function. And then you have to keep drinking it through the race and everything. Because if you don’t, you’re gonna bunk, you know, you’re gonna run out of energy, which is true. If you if, if you’re an athlete that operates on carbs, there’s so much that we learning now, but the fat adapted athletes that don’t require that, you know, that actually can run a marathon, not just water, because there’s that, right, yeah, it’s this, there’s some incredible stuff going on there. With it, now, you know, it, but there’s only a few of them that are doing that. And people like Steve Finney and Jeff, that are doing that are doing research and that in this in this area. But I think it’s slowly as as some of the really, really successful athletes, it becomes out that they are, that’s how they are functioning. More people will start to take it seriously. And you know, it’s like everything with with this whole lifestyle thing. It’s like, it’s it’s like walking through treacle, it’s taking a long time to get it going. But at some point, it’s going to hit this threshold and I believe in time become a de facto way to to live and to train as an athlete.
Robert Lufkin 22:27
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just not to get off track here. But for for long distance running. Is there any value if you’re fat adapted? Is there any value for carbo loading carb loading? Now? Is that a?
Doug Reynolds 22:38
No? Well, no, they are, there’s some people, and I still believe that it’s the people that are that still can’t get their brain over the fact that this is possible, you know, so they train like this, but then when they get to their race, they say, oh, no, you have to trickle some carbs in it, you know, especially for distance races. You can’t, you can’t train for something and see what your performance is like, and then repeat that. And you know, you can’t do it a trial and do and do the opposite, like do it on carbs once and then fat adapted all the time, because it takes you months, sometimes years to train for this event. And and then you know that on that particular day there were there and your biorhythms and all sorts of things you could do, you just cannot compare it. Whereas a sprinter or something like that, like he can literally look at his times and see how if that is actually coming down, you know, and so there’s a way to really to, to check that out. Whereas for a distance athlete, and the longer the distance more difficult it is to try and repeat something, you know, trying different things. So it’s really going to be about looking at the biochemistry and looking at the biology and looking at the science and believing in it. And I believe that if you are properly adapted that taking taking some kind of glucose or something before the race is actually going to do more harm than good. Because like, you know, you are aware of the fact that if you like this whole thing about if you’re in ketosis, and you and you and you have a high carb meal, it kind of you kind of dropped out of ketosis for a bit right? So if you if you get the morning before the race and you have a thing of bowl of oatmeal or something like that. I think that all your fat adaptation is out the window. And so now you’re basically back to where you started and you’re running through that race and you’re going to be taking carbs through the race and and you’re running on carbs again, and you’ve you’ve just undone all the work you’ve done to get fat adapted But there isn’t any really good trial or scientific text, you know, research or anything that’s been done in this. I think it’s, it’s more what what we believe, and and what we believe, based on what we’ve learned from as much research as we’ve done into LSA, the biology and the biochemistry of how it how everything works. So I, at best, there’s the idea that you need to literally talk about, like, sucking a boiled sweet, both sweet and your tongue something and letting that that trickle of glucose into your system as you as you as you run it. You know, maybe I don’t believe it would, but maybe, maybe it doesn’t one day, there’ll be some research that actually, that actually shows that, but I don’t know. I don’t believe it.
Robert Lufkin 26:02
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s fairly specialized and difficult to get that data, we’re still people are still arguing about just what regular people should.
Doug Reynolds 26:13
Exactly, yeah, we have a we
Robert Lufkin 26:15
have a long, long way to go on that. Well, well, it’s tremendous what you’ve done with low carb, USA, it’s such a great service to to everyone to have that available for them. So the the next step beyond low carb, USA, and then the next step in your journey was to put together a go beyond an annual conference, but actually put together a Scientific Medical Society. And that’s, that’s really exciting, because that can do things that that the conference can’t do.
Doug Reynolds 26:51
Definitely. Yeah. So I mean, that, you know, that was that was a progression as well. I mean, it started out with Gary Taubes. In fact, like I was talking to him about coming back to do the 2018 event, I think, and he asked, it suggested that we have a session should actually have practitioners in the audience, come and talk about their, their experiences and trying to do this in practice, you know, and what, what the difficulties were and successes and failures and stuff. And it helped him because it was the subject of his of his next book. But I got to have him do his until plus a second session, right? So I got to keep him, keep him there for for longer. And he got to, he introduced me to Adele Hyde, who he suggested we get her to mediate the thing. And he’d obviously been talking to her a lot about this offline. And, and so I got hold of her and she just it she just gave me this brain dump and of all these things that she can ahead of how she that her vision of where this whole metabolic health space should be down the road, you know. And she talked about a malpractice suit that she was on the jury for, and that at the end of it, A, the judge had to explain to the jury what standard of care meant. And I actually pulled it up this and since we said, we might, we might talk about this, but basically what he told me this is the legal definition. In the US our standard of care, the standard of care is defined as providing health care in accordance with the standards of practice among members of the same healthcare profession, with similar training, and experience and situated in the same or similar communities at the time that healthcare is rendered. In other words, standard of care does not come from what is taught in professional training, from public health policy, or even from clinical care guidelines. Although these can inform and help define the standard of care. Rather, standard of care comes from what a community of clinicians do in the actual provision of care. So it’s a it’s an intangible thing. And it’s really at the end of the day, if the judge needs to understand that he’s gonna call in 500 doctors and say, given this situation, what would you do? And whatever the consensus is, that is standard of care. And it evolves over time, you know, which is which, which makes sense because we learn supposedly, we learn stuff all the time, although there’s so many doctors that hear about this low carb thing and sort of stick their hands head in the sand and refuse to take it on board. But some of those things started to jump out to me Because the beginning was just such a huge thing that she was talking about, about trying to do is establish care, an alternative standard of care around carbohydrate restriction. So we’re not even going to say they’re wrong. And we’re right, just our metabolisms, people that don’t eat carbs, the ones that are fat adapted our metabolisms different. So the same standards shouldn’t apply to us. And they, but there isn’t an a recognised standard for outside of the current standard of care. Me, she said the very first thing that we do need, even though it doesn’t, in and of itself, it’s not standard as a document, the standard of care document, but a set of clinical guidelines, would be a really great starting point. And she’d been wanting to do this for ages, but just never had the tools and the wherewithal to be able to do it. And that was where we came together, right? Because I had access to all by that stage. So some many other people like high profile people in this in this space. And so we put a panel of advisors together. That was I think there was 15 people, really, you know, high profile people, Tim Noakes and Eric Westman. And what’s his name? Dave Anwen, in the UK, and Gary Fettke, and like, really prominent people. And she basically like I’m an engineer, right? So she just she said, You’re not a physician, she kicked me out the door. And she’s, I just provided the
the playpen now let’s baseflow to work. And then she basically wrote this document, and she bounced it off this panel, until everybody agreed that that it was at a place where we could publish it. And then at that time, I published it on the low carb USA website. And it actually got a lot of traction, and a lot of people saw it, but it really wasn’t the right place. And I tried to implement the concept of professional membership in low carb USA to try and create these communities of physicians and practitioners that way they could have these discussions around these guidelines. And in essence, eventually, you know that those discussions would form the consensus that would be come standard of care. But it just, it just wasn’t the right place for it. And it just didn’t, didn’t take off at all. I mean that that’s guidelines were happening, and they went far and wide. But it just didn’t go any further than that. And then, Dr. Troy Collegian, you’re familiar with him from the low carb MD podcast, right? So he started writing stuff on Twitter about we need a professional community for that for as a club, doctors and stuff. And I got hold of him and said look like we already have this concept in low carb, USA, but it’s not working. So what do we need to do? And we got on the phone and chatted a lot and eventually kind of decided that the best way to do this was to create an establish a proper nonprofit, organization, medical organization. That was an umbrella for all of these people that were open to carbohydrate production. And in fact, I got a board of directors there, including Rob Cyrus and Eric Westman. In fact, I think it was Eric’s terminology that we ended up focusing on in describing the organization. And we moved away from the talk about keto and low carb and carbohydrate reduction and all of those things, and focused on metabolic health. So you’ll notice that the society of metabolic health practitioners, right, and we focus on metabolic health and how to achieve that. And yes, you know, some kind of carbohydrate reduction is is for the most part way to get there. But it’s not necessarily that anyway. And that’s the thing what I like about this is that it’s open to anybody that can come and show us evidence that a certain protocol of any kind contributes to improve metabolic health of any kind. is welcome in the space write that let’s let’s learn it. It’s not for everyone. I think it’s for I personally believe it’s for most people, but it’s an for everyone, and we have to be open to that. And we have to learn. How do we how do we help those other people to maybe be maybe not optimally healthy but healthier than then they are metabolically. And so yeah, I mean, it’s a nice day, we migrated the clinical guidelines into the SM HP. And I think Adele is like beside itself, she’s so excited because this, I think it took a long time to get there. And it took her a long time to get my brain there. But I think that was what she was, what she hadn’t had envisaged all along. But she was wise enough to, to not overwhelm me completely. And let’s start here with the clinical guidelines and build from that. And the whole thing, the evolution of it kind of just became a natural progression. And we’ve, yeah, I mean, I, you know, I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life, but I’m, I’m pretty proud of this. It’s, I think we do a lot of good and it’s, it’s helping a lot of people.
Robert Lufkin 36:16
Well, if you think about it, and I’m, I’m from the traditional medical institutions, medical school faculty, professor, my whole career, basically, that’s all I do is traditional medicine, and what you’ve identified here and creating this organization to go after this metabolic health, I would submit it’s the number one health problem we face in the world. I mean, beyond COVID, beyond anything else, diabetes, obesity, and all the related disease, dyslipidemia, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, dementia, some cancers, you know, you know, the list. Yeah. And, and it even goes beyond that. But, but this is such an important problem. And this society is positioned right to it. I don’t know why, you know, more. I don’t know why more people aren’t behind this, and why it’s not growing faster than it already is. It’s, it’s a big issue about awareness. And yeah,
Doug Reynolds 37:21
so I think the, you know, I think the people, the people that hear about it, get excited, and time on board, it’s a matter of people hearing about it, you know, and we stalled fairly small, and we know, the funds are still growing. But we need, we need a lot of money at the end to actually put I think, to put behind, eventually advertising and stuff like that to, to, to get the message out there. Because it led people allegedly coming on board as fast as they as our reach is growing organically, slowly. And as we reach people, they think, Wow, this is a good idea. And then they come and they either join up as a can they listed or as a provider for nothing, or they can join the membership have access to some amazing grant. So we’ve got a series of grant grant talks we do like every every month, and then we package them together in blocks of six to provide people with continuing education credits for I think it’s 1010 credits per module. So as a member you get access to that for free, we’re busy designing and eventually put together a what’s it called? Journal. So we will start we will be collecting case reports and stuff like that, but you know, there’ll be a charge for people to to submit something to the journal but if you’re a member, then you get to submit work for free. And so and then there’s this whole concept of accreditation. So people can there’s we defined a whole bunch of different pathways that people can follow to show their competence. And once once they’ve achieved that they we get a special badge that they can display that is displayed in the provider list for them automatically, but they can put it on a stationary or whatever website if they if they choose to. And they can use the credentials MHP for metabolic health practitioner. And yeah, I mean that like every day I get a couple of New applications are people that have gone through the training. And in the beginning, it was like, slowly, like we had three. And I went through all the training myself. And I think I was one of the first people and I had a couple of people that just got stuck in and they just, you know, within two weeks, they were, they were already up there. And then it kind of stayed there. But all the people who didn’t realize it, but everyone was really excited, but they were all working on, on getting through the training or writing these big essays or whatever it is that they needed to do. And now recently, it’s like, all of those people are starting to come on board. So we’re getting this trickle every day have a few more people applying, like they’ve done what they needed now. Yes, all the stuff and put in the application to get accredited. I think we’ve got like 50 people accredited now already, which is, which is very cool.
Robert Lufkin 40:53
That’s That’s so exciting. I, I love that you’re doing the journal too, and building out the scientific part of it. I, I hope you’re considering having a scientific sessions at the, you know, given COVID and everything, but it’s resolving maybe a joint session with low carb San Diego or something where you’d have scientific posters and papers presented from this society? Because you’d get a lot of Yeah, yeah,
Doug Reynolds 41:21
I think so we can, we can try and do that, and work out how that might look. One of the other things we’ll be talking about doing is putting on actual medical conference. Under trial, actually, USA has been aching to have have one, at least in New York. So I think we thinking that 2022 is going to be too soon, but maybe 2023 would do it. But instead of a low carb USA one, it’ll be a medical grade conference. Under the umbrella of SMA, HP, in New York will be the first one and maybe what we’ll do then is like, each year, we’ll have it but it’ll be like rotate around different cities through throughout the US or something. And maybe, I mean, it’s an international organization, so maybe even, you know, when you’re we might have it somewhere else. And then we’ll have like in the UK or, or something else. Who knows, I mean, you know, I started out trying to put on one conference. And now look where we are. I think if I even had an inkling of how much we were going to end up doing, I wouldn’t have had the strength to to get started. So it was good that we started small. But yeah, we’ve just grown into it as we as you get as you get comfortable. And that’s always like every time I’m starting to get comfortable with the amount of work and the amount of stuff that we’ve that we’re doing. Someone will come up with another idea. And I was like now, and then it starts like percolating in my brain. Yeah, actually, we should do that, you know. There’s always like, No, I don’t want to take on any more work. I’ve got enough. But but then you find more efficient ways of doing the stuff you’re already doing so that it doesn’t take quite as long anymore. I would say you make bandwidth to do to get more stuff done.
Robert Lufkin 43:18
Yeah, that’s so exciting. I can’t wait for those conferences coming up. That’s gonna be that it’s an exciting time in this whole space in, in, in medicine in particular. But this, the metabolic health is just, you know, it’s expanding. What Why do you think there is such a given it is expanding, but it’s not expanding as fast as we did. Why do you think there’s such pushback from traditional medicine? I mean, we see, you know, things are, you know, there’s pushback on diets, there’s politicization, you were mentioning Ivor Cummins, in his thing, that’s a whole nother deal. But even within diets, there’s, you know, between the paleo and the, you know, the animal plant sections, there’s a there’s a politicization and less so between high fat, you know, low fat, low carb, but there’s, there’s still this, what do you why is there what is the pushback on metabolic health?
Doug Reynolds 44:18
You know, I, I actually struggled to, to understand it myself. It’s like, how can how can anyone look at the results and not believe that there’s something to this? You know, I mean, Brian Lin’s case is that the half of the low carb MD podcast that we talked about, I mean, he came to our conference in 2017 or 18. And he had been secretly doing it on his own, because he was struggling, you know, he was getting sick and fat and sick. Following the advice that he was Giving his own patients. And then he learned about the low carb thing and tried it and fasting as well through Jason Fung and was having amazing results and people asking him what he was doing and saying I just some some new diet, you know. And then he came to our event and saw all of these speakers and you know, international people talking about it and realize like, well, this is like, this is real. And he went back and then like literally that Monday, he started talking to patients, not approaching them about it. But when they asked him, How can you looking so good doc, like he would say, Okay, if you really want to know, then this is what I’m doing. And if you you need to go back and learn about it some more. But if you want to do this, I will support you and I’ll help you. And he reached out, I didn’t even see him at the event. I didn’t know him at that stage. And he reached out to me in November. And we ended up meeting for lunch somewhere. And he was sitting in this is like five months later. He said you’re not dying. He said I’ve been there was more than 20 years that he’d been practicing. And you said I’d never ever taken a patient of insulin. said in the last five months, I’ve had 11 Patients come off insulin. He said I didn’t take them off insulin, they took themselves of insulin. All I did was show them how they needed to change their lifestyles and help them to get that done 511 patients in five months from zero in 20 years. And I even I was I was interviewed on that on that movie fact fiction. And I said I was suddenly like, how is it possible that people can look at that and not believe that is that is something with at least investigating and looking at trying to understand like how this is possible. And when they start doing that they will start to seal and you know, Brian’s little example but there’s there’s ducks up a sock Cibus rabbit Cibus has been doing this for for donkey’s years as well also, like, honestly, like just with his patients, he’s given up trying to talk about it as it is bariatric surgeons conferences and obesity medicine conferences, because people were literally attacking him for it. And so he was doing and he just did he just he still worked with these patients that 1000s of of patients now, you know, stories and that of all the successes that he’s had with his like he said, I’m trying to put myself out of business is a bariatric surgeon. He said I would you know, people I teach people listen, most of the time, a lot of the time, they don’t even end up needing the surgery. But if people that that information is especially nowadays is more and more and more than information, how that how is it possible that a doctor can can be faced with all this evidence, and still absolutely categorically refused to believe it’s right. And even in times like attack that has people threaten to take him to court? All this kind of stuff? I mean, that kind of stuff going on all the time? How possible? Yeah, I just I don’t understand it, I literally cannot understand it. Other than they are so brainwashed from from their training that they cannot believe that they went through 12 years of training or whatever to end up. Yeah. And everything, at least about metabolic disease. But chronic diseases, the everything they learned was was wrong. And they just cannot get their brain around that. Yeah, they just believe it. Absolutely. This is how it is because this is what I was taught and everything else is just bullshit. And some of these guys are these guys are heathens. And how else do you explain it? I don’t know.
Robert Lufkin 48:56
Yeah, well, let me let me highlight a couple things. You said it, I love the stories of the surgeons are going back like Phil oveja, who’s on the program and he has his new book coming out, stay off my table. He’s a he’s a current cardiothoracic surgeon who’s now teaching patients about heart health through metabolic health, so that they don’t need surgery. It’s a great thing and then and then you touched on the idea of deep prescribed D prescribing a deep prescription is such such an amazing thing and it’s made power made possible through largely in this case through metabolic health. Thanks not only the the diabetes medicines for type two diabetes, which is revolutionary, but also for hypertension for statins. For dyslipidemia, we’re seeing you know, patients come off those all the time with with with restoring metabolic health and and that may be one reason we’re getting pushback from you know, from vested interests, certainly that sell those things.
Doug Reynolds 49:55
Right. So that you know, I mean, there’s there’s that huge pressure The sugar industry, as you mentioned, on the nutrition side, they pushing back against this whole concept all the time. But then the pharmaceutical industry as well, it’s like, if we make everybody healthy, then then, you know, I mean, if you stop everybody taking all these diabetes medications, there’s pharmaceutical companies that regarded business like government. And so that, and they seen that, and so they have active campaigns to try and undermine everything that we’re doing all the time and sort of be fighting against. And maybe, you know, the day that education, fake education, whatever it is that they put out there, they inundate these doctors with it all the time saying these guys are talking rubbish. And this is, you know, this is hard is I can’t how you’ve been taught this right? And then I guess the next better medication or whatever. And so maybe that keeps those those doctors who are nonbelievers on the line all the time, maybe contributes to that.
Robert Lufkin 51:05
Yeah. And we touched on this when we talked about the standard of care. And also you mentioned it briefly, one form of pushback that that some very prominent physicians have encountered is legal as lawsuits from their professional medical data, and maybe you could just touch on one.
Doug Reynolds 51:23
Yeah, so you know, I think that’s, that’s the thing is that that was the Adele’s whole idea is that we have this, we have this place where where, because, you know, if you look back at the definition, they talking about people with similar training, in similar professions in similar communities. And so if we provide that community, and we and we, and we collate all that data, we were talking about, offline, about collecting some, some some imaging data. But if we correlate all this data, and all these conversations are in one place, and now you’re starting to establish standard of care. It’s not established yet but it’s but it’s a long way down the line, we have set a clinical guidelines that everybody that’s a member, and there’s a on the website, there’s a there’s a thing where you can actually like a petition, almost where you can add your name to a list of people that support these clinical guidelines. And as that list grows, now, if a doctor or physician ends up in court, for some reason, for advocating this lifestyle change, they are now there’s a community of people now that that, that we can draw on that these lawyers can draw on that the judge can, can go go to and Paul these people and say, right, like, did they do the right thing? And obviously, everyone here is gonna say absolutely. And, and now because it talks about similar training, these people, you know, our community’s gone through training about it lifestyle interventions for metabolic health. So the only people that actually are qualified to, to actually have an opinion here are the ones that have actually done the training, because if you haven’t done the training, and you don’t even know, so how can you have an opinion on it? Right, and so the lawyers can argue this and that and done the way that I feel gives gives them a lot of, of protection that they didn’t ever have before. And as this community grows, and as these conversations grow, and as this consensus forms, more and more, they’re more and more protected and to the point where it might be a malpractice suit but they won’t be a malpractice suit for advocating this this lifestyle intervention that’ll be for something else they did wrong. But not for advocating this lifestyle and won’t even ever be an issue anymore that’s I can retire because yeah,
Robert Lufkin 54:04
well that yeah, this this is I can’t underscore score. How am I can’t say enough how important this is it’s such such great work you’re doing and I always I always like to ask as a as an expert in this area because metabolic health I wonder what if you if you wouldn’t mind talking, Doug about what personal choices you make you’ve you’ve mentioned a little in the beginning but what are you currently doing for for your metabolic health as far as lifestyle or even supplements choices like that?
Doug Reynolds 54:39
Yeah, so um, I saw supplements go I found that this this diet, unlike calling it a diet, but when we talk about supplements, we’re talking about nutrition, this diet unless you are you have some kind of condition or whatever, obviously You know, all things being equal in without those kind of conditions. They shouldn’t be any supplementation required. That’s my personal opinion. And I don’t take any supplements other than salt, if you want to kind of consider that a supplement. When we started this, like we were, like, it’s so different than being an athlete, especially when it’s so phobic about fat and everything. And I was, I was having to introduce fat back into my diet and have fatty meat and, you know, full cream, yogurt and all that stuff. And it was like, we need to compensate for this. And so very focused on the low carb vegetables, kale and spinach and broccoli, and cauliflower and those kinds of things. And, like, ate way more vegetables then than I used to before, even when I was on the SAD diet, right. But obviously, not the potatoes and sweet potatoes and all those kinds of things, but the very low carb keto type vegetables, and like, we always focused every day on making sure we had a bunch of these vegetables in on the plate. But over the last five years, as I’ve learned more and more, I’ve started to learn that vegetables are maybe not quite as, as important as we were led to believe. And you know, there’s input from the rate from from the carnivore community, which is strictly no, you know, no, no vegetables at all. And yet, there’s people within that community that are absolutely thriving. And to me, it shows that, that maybe what they’re saying is, right. One of the examples that I have is Dr. Georgia eat, she’s a psychiatrist, who spoke at a couple of our, spoken a few of our events. And we became really good friends with her. And you know, she came she’s brilliant speaker and, but over the years, she was even though things have improved immensely, when she went keto, she still had some medical issues that she was still battling with, including the last bit of weight loss that she the plateau that she couldn’t get off and she decided to go carnivore as an elimination exercise. So the idea was to go carnivore, and then start adding things like see if it made the difference, and start adding things back until until things went wrong again, okay, now I know what it is. She looks fantastic. She She just loved it so much that she did she she never even went to the, to the next phase of adding stuff back again, she’s just stayed kind of all and and swears by it. So I have kind of migrated towards that carnivore type thing I’m not an avid carnivore, I don’t refuse to eat have gone pepper on my, on my steak, because it’s because that’s a plant, you know, which, which, with you know, the really hardcore carnivores, I like that, you know. And, like Pam pan still has some cauliflower rice, and you know, some spinach not again, and that kind of stuff. But most of the time, I don’t, sometimes it’s like, got a bunch of cheddar cheese in it, and then I’ll put it on my plate, you know. So I do sometimes she does a thing with these large shrimps and like the amazing dish that she does that has some broccoli and spinach and stuff in as well. And when she makes it, I eat it, you know, but I don’t eat a lot of vegetation as I as I call it. But it’s been a it’s been a joy as with everything that we’ve been through over the last five years, it’s been a journey and and, you know, I may learn more down the road as well you know what, you you maybe you didn’t see it, but five years down the road, you’re gonna see something that that’s not ideal unless you add something back in if the science is robust enough to to show me that that’s the case. I’ll add stuff back in again, you know, I’m learning every day.
But I tend towards the carnivore side of things these days, maybe in the last year or so I’d say. And then, if you don’t mind me adding in one of the things that we’ve got a low carb USA if you would have seen Dr. Benbow Kikyo to be a few years ago asked if he could do a talk and we gave him breakout took that year. And it was such a hit that sort of the next conference. And from then onwards, he’s been like, on the mainstage. But he’s got this concept of because we all talk about exercise, you can’t lose weight by by exercising, right, you can’t outrun a bad diet, which is true. But his concept of high intensity exercise that what he calls smart training, slow maximum resistance training. And the idea is that you do one set of one exercise for each major muscle group to failure. So you choose the weight, so that you fail in a window between 30 and 90 seconds. And you fail completely, like literally, your muscles cannot do any more that that particular muscle group, and then you move on immediately to the next one. Finish the workout in 20 minutes in 15, less than 15 minutes. And, and you do that twice a week. That’s it. And so 15 minutes, twice a week. In fact, I think that’s I think that’s the name, that’s the name of his book. 15 minutes to fitness is the name of his book, actually. And what he talks about is the fact that this actually activates the same metabolic pathways with a lot of similar metabolic pathways to the ketogenic diet. And he’s even had patients that refused to change their diet, who have still had major metabolic improvements just by doing introducing this extra, like 15 minutes twice a week, like anybody can do that, right. And I started doing that in three months, I put on four pounds of muscle mass at the age of like 54. Literally working out twice a week for 15 minutes. Wow. So that has been a huge epiphany for me, it’s been a it’s those workouts are absolutely a part of our life. Now. In fact, I’ve got a I’ve got a whole time gym that I bought when COVID hits and we couldn’t we couldn’t go to the gym anymore. And now because it’s in the house, it’s literally 15 minutes like your whatever they
encourage people to take a look at because it can. It can help get people over the hump. It can help people who really struggled to especially like they got families where they can’t, can’t get a proper keto diet in because it just I understand families sometimes just can’t do that. Because of the other family members under pressure from them, and you know, they need to feed them. But they but they won. This is a way to this is a game changer. It really is. It’s an amazing thing that people should should be aware of.
Robert Lufkin 1:02:59
Right? Yeah, well, we’ll put that we’ll put that information down there as far as devices. Do you use CGM or ketone monitors? I assume you’re in ketosis all the time.
Doug Reynolds 1:03:09
Yeah, well, yeah. So for the longest time, I just knew I was and I ever, you know, we couldn’t afford to pay for CGM and stuff like that. But the company called levels is building an app on top of us of the standard CGM. And they asked me to trial this for them once. And so they gave me a CGM for a month. And so yeah, well, I did it. For the most part, it just validated what you’re what I was expecting my may not mind. Because Don it sort of, I don’t know, 79 to 85, or something. And that just like, pretty much stays there. unless I do something like a noun. Again, we’re going to have a Starbucks coffee with half and half in it, like right away, and you’ll see the thing rise up to about 120 or so and then come back down again. And what I did notice was that there was a huge spike at the end of my high intensity workout, which we still try and try to understand that you you said you watch the San Diego one. So either Agatston he’s in Florida, and he’s actually coming to speak at the Florida event as well. But he’s his his facility is there. So we actually want to go and do and do an experiment. They’re basically like a like a craft test. But instead of a glucose bolus, I’m basically going to do a workout. Oh, yeah. Because I literally I would, I would scan myself before and few times through the workout. And then just before immediately after I finished, and it was like anyone, anyone at 79th Anyone, anyone all the way through. And then about five minutes after I was just like laying there on the bench like trying to recover. And it’s shot up to 180. And then over over to over two hours or something it comes comes back down again. So, so we want to go and do that. I want to see all the insulin responses and that and that. Through that five hour period. Yeah. And at office at his facility.
Robert Lufkin 1:05:31
Oh, that would be great. And that’s that’s coming up for the January, Florida. Yeah, well,
Doug Reynolds 1:05:34
I think we I think I’m only gonna manage to get to get down to his place, like after the event, but okay. We’ll definitely, we’ll probably talk about it at the event. And we will, you know, we’ll publish publish all the results and that afterwards, because I think it’s fascinating.
Robert Lufkin 1:05:50
Yeah. Oh, that’s Yeah. And what you were showing on your glucose monitor, it shows the value of those things that
Doug Reynolds 1:05:56
keep me Oh, yeah, I would have no had no idea that that was going on, unless I had that thing on. So like I said, I didn’t have any surprises because I wasn’t eating any crap, you know? Yeah. I wasn’t it’s really useful for people that are just starting out because then they can see immediately exactly correct. Things that that I didn’t know in the beginning. You know, they thought that we thought were low carb and they were really those are that’s a really good learning tool for that. Yeah,
Robert Lufkin 1:06:25
there’s companies that phase
Doug Reynolds 1:06:27
but this this was just like, wow, that I had no I did good. Yeah,
Robert Lufkin 1:06:32
it’s it’s a great tool. When you’re starting out in those companies like levels, their CEO or CMO. Casey means writer means it’s going to be on the program. Talking about there several other companies that are I think verta uses it, but these are game changers really to let people tune into their metabolism. You know, we just need Apple to get it on their smartwatch.
Doug Reynolds 1:06:54
Exactly. They just needs to get where you don’t need a doctor’s prescription to get the CGM. I think that’s everybody, everybody, and especially every doctor should have to wear a CGM, because I think that would that would be that would do a lot to to have some of these guys that are still got their heads in the sand. Now if it was compulsory that they had to wear a CGM for a month, that’s why I think they’d be fascinated,
Robert Lufkin 1:07:19
you know, Apple Computer. Apple is gonna put it on their smartwatch hopefully next year, as well as Android, they have a patent for Romane spectroscopy. So it’ll go just go through the skin and do glucose monitoring real time, which will be a game changer, just like you say it’ll it’ll affect behavior, if everyone sees it all the time. Think what they’re going to be aware of their metabolic health, you know, at least the glucose indicators of it. But yeah, great things ahead. I have one last thing. How about fasting is that you mentioned you and Jason did some work together Jason Fung.
Doug Reynolds 1:07:54
Not Not really. He, he came and spoke at our first event. I’ve managed to get him back to do anything since then. But I mentioned that Brian landscape has learned a lot from him and he incorporated some fast thing into like, I feel like it’s a natural progression. You know, like, as you become properly adapted, you’re not hungry anymore. And eating, you know, Rob cybers is a big one. This is all his hype, fangled newfangled, intimate and fasting. He says, I just call it eating once a day, you know. And to eat once a day, once you’ve probably adapted is like, muscle time, I don’t even think about it. I’m working and it’s like six o’clock, like, Hey, I better get something to eat, you know, mainly because I need to get because it’s supper time, not because I actually need I’m never starving ever. And but I have never gone past 24 hours, I’ve never done an extended fast. Um, I think certain people it’s, it can be of some benefit to them. But I think personally, I think that people talk about this a fatty, flippantly that I think, once you go past 24 hours, maybe two days, I think Steve funny even says that it’s just like 48 hours of sleep, okay. But when you start to get into three, four or five days a week, whatever, like, you know, the people just need to be careful, especially coming back from it and, and be aware of the possibilities of, you know, muscle wasting and stuff like that. Some of the Proponents claim absolutely categorically that it doesn’t result in that Stephanie saying, well, that’s not possible. If you look at the biochemistry, it’s not possible. And so there’s a there’s a there’s a lot of noise out there. About extended fasts. Yeah 24 hours 40 Even 48 hours, I think I think hugely beneficial. But longer than that, for me the jury’s still out. I don’t I don’t know enough about about it to really even want to do it for myself and especially not to advocated for someone else.
Robert Lufkin 1:10:24
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, well, Doug, this has been so much fun today. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Maybe you could tell tell our audience the best way for them to follow you on social media and also your websites. We’ll put them in the show notes as well but you could tell them for people who are listening to the program.
Doug Reynolds 1:10:45
Okay, cool. So the low carb USA website is low carb usa.org not.com.org and social media it’s like low carb USA for every leg of yours and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram YouTube anyway, your low carb USA one word. For the SMA HP, it’s the same thing. It’s the SM hp.org. We have the.com domain there as well. So that points to the.org one and SMS via Twitter, Facebook as well. So there is an HP or low carb USA pretty much a search for that and you’ll find everything.
Robert Lufkin 1:11:39
Oh, excellent. Yeah, and thanks thanks again Doug. So much. It’s been great getting to know you this hour and and hearing about all the all the all the beautiful work you’re doing to make people aware of metabolic health and and these opportunities that they can go and participate in these courses and have a real immersive experience of community. It’s a great thing. So thanks. Thanks again, Doug for being on the show. Appreciate it, man.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:09
Thanks for having me. Know, this is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have. Never disregard professional medical advice or delayed seeking of it because there’s something you’ve seen here. If you find this to be a value of you, please hit that like button and subscribe support the work we do on this channel. Also, we take your suggestions and advice very seriously. Please let us know what you’d like to see on this channel. Thanks for watching and hope to see you next time.