Outreach Committee

There is  a huge need to reach other diverse ethnic communities with this message as well as the need for research into differences in metabolic risk and the response to lifestyle interventions based on ethnicity.  This committee will seek to address both these issues.

Tony Hampton 300x300

Tony Hampton, MD

Committee Chair

Dr. Hampton is especially passionate about removing barriers to health and equipping patients and his colleagues with the education and resources they need to take charge of their health. He previously served as the medical director of the Advocate Operating System, where he collaborated with clinicians and staff on programs to address social determinants of health among at-risk patient populations. For example, for the Healthy Living program, he develops education around nutrition and weight loss that help patients set realistic and attainable goals. He's also an ambassador for the program, encouraging his physician colleagues to refer their patients.

The same goes for the AdvocateCare Center (a place where patients receive multidisciplinary care in one visit), inspiring his colleagues to utilize the Center as a partner to help them manage their patients with multiple chronic diseases and improve their quality of life. He has also been instrumental in the launch of the Food Farmacy (that's FARM-acy with an "F") at Advocate Trinity Hospital to increase access to fresh, healthy food for patients and community members in need in partnership with the Chicago Food Depository. He is a board-certified obesity specialist, working with patients individually in the clinic and with small groups enrolled in the diabetes prevention program (D.P.P.). As one of only just over 3,000 Board Certified Obesity Medicine Specialists in the United States, he's been able to use his knowledge to help develop and support programs that reduce the obesity burden.

He has participated in novel research, serving as the lead researcher for the Merck/Premiere-sponsored trial, where he worked in collaboration with other thought leaders to develop a point-of-care tool to be used by front-line physicians to improve diabetes care using patient data. In addition, he uses his experience as a clinician leader within one of the largest health systems and highest performing accountable care organizations in the US, Advocate Health Care, to provide input to all research phases and to guide data collection and management for the project.

He is a tireless leader and cheerleader for performance excellence, serving on A.M.G.'s Governing Council, Health Outcomes Committee, and Advocate's Executive Diversity Council. His current role is Regional Medical Director for the South Region in Chicago. He authored the book: Fix Your Diet, Fix Your Diabetes, and is an active blogger on social media. His newest projects include creating more educational videos/interviews on YouTube and starting his Podcast in June 2020 entitled: Protecting Your N.E.S.T. with Dr. Tony Hampton.  His new website will be active June 2020 which provides access to all the work he is doing: www.doctortonyhampton.com

Vyvyane Loh, MD

Dr. Vyvyane Loh is board-certified in Obesity Medicine and Internal Medicine. She graduated from Boston University School of Medicine and trained at Newton-Wellesley Hospital where she also served as Chief Resident. Dr. Loh worked at HMR and was the medical obesity specialist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital’s Center for Weight Loss Surgery before starting her own practice. She serves on the ABOM exam writing board and is a member of the Obesity Medicine Association and The Obesity Society. Her other achievements include choreography and writing. She was the recipient of the Bunting/Radcliffe Fellowship in Fiction in 2006, a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction in 2008, and shortlisted for the 2005 international IMPAC Award in Literature. Her diverse skills support her commitment to celebrating the full range of our humanity in an increasingly technological and disembodied world through art and the healing sciences.

Vyvyane Loh, MD

Gurpreet Padda, MD

Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda is a Medical Physician, Board Certified in Anesthesiology, Addiction and Interventional Pain.  For over 20 years he has practiced in the Urban Core, helping his patients regain their metabolic health.

Pain is the final pathway, the body screaming that something has gone terribly wrong.  Dr. Padda treats clinically patients at the intersection of the pain epidemic, opioid epidemic, and the diabetes epidemic.  They are all inter-related pathologies, the clinical manifestations of systemic metainflammation. 

I spend most of my clinical hours dealing with chronic degenerative diseases that are primarily driven by Metabolic Syndrome leading to Metainflammation.  Metabolic Syndrome is a form of malnutrition, a malnutrition of excessive energy consumption and toxicity from:

Acellular Carbohydrates

Synthetic Vegetable Oil consumption

This malnutrition of excess is aggravated by leaky gut from plant based chemical defenses. 

The Standard American Diet has become calorically dense, but diluted of protein, minerals, and micronutrients.  

Unfortunately, Governmental policy combined with the profit motives of Big-Food and Big-Pharma encourages the consumption of manufactured foods, which may be non-nutritive and promote chronic systemic diseases.  This disparity of synthesized food (which contains low nutritional value but high caloric load) leads to caloric over consumption, energy toxicity and eventual diabesity.

Addiction behavior is manipulated by dopaminergic modulation by food manufacturers and gamification of passive activities, in the context of individual loneliness.  Social media “connectedness” has created a false paradigm of human interaction, leaving individuals in silos of anonymous and self-destructive behavior.

Humans are complex adaptive systems, and systematic failure is rarely a single cause phenomenon.  Our historical disease models of single cause pathology are inadequate for this new synthesized Universe.

Gurpreet Padda, MD

Pam Devine

I turned 47 last Fall, and am super excited that I’ve found something that works to help me lose the weight that I’ve put on since turning 40 which, no matter what I did, I couldn’t lose.  I seemed to work out more than many of the people I encountered during my work day and was getting super frustrated with my failure to keep it under control.  I’ve also found peace of mind, feeling totally satiated and more focused than I’ve ever been!

I have a passion for helping people and have over 40 years’ experience in service-based environments including customer, employee, or marketing team support in either a healthcare diagnostic setting, hospital, doctors’ office, retail, and the corporate arena.  I always find pleasure in making an experience easier, and more worthwhile.

I also have extensive experience with hosting events and overseeing the day to day operations of a large organization. Now I’ll be doing it for something I’m really passionate about too!

With our commitment to put on events to share all the latest research with our growing community and with our coaching program we will be able to ‘Turn consensus on its head!!’  Won’t you join us and help make strides, one meal at a time, towards halting the catastrophic rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic diseases that we’ve seen since 1977.

Pam Devine

Doug Reynolds

Doug Reynolds is the Founder and CEO of LowCarbUSA®.  The original organization was founded in the beginning of 2016 with the initial  intention of providing  a platform, through an annual conference, for internationally renowned 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).  He felt that education about the power of the low carb/ketogenic diet for the individual who may not get the information from their medical team or from mainstream nutrition advice, and for practitioners who may then be able to prescribe it in their practice was critical.

However, his mission quickly evolved when he realized how important this was to the medical professional community.  Valuable tools are needed, not only to provide hope to their patients to reverse and prevent disease but restore hope to that very practitioner. This is why they went to medical school and got professional training, to help people heal and not just put Band-Aids on and never address the root cause of the problem.  Too many practitioners are being taught that the many chronic diseases our communities are facing are just chronic and progressive.  With effective tools and supportive information, complications can be stopped in their tracks and further complications reduced and the disease process may even be reversed.

The tools and resources Low Carb USA has been providing,  not only includes the live conferences, but also  includes a huge library of educational videos, a growing database of practitioners, and nutritionists and sports trainers who are open to  the carb restriction conversation as well as a searchable database for papers and articles covering the research into the evidence supporting this lifestyle.

Most importantly, though, he has coordinated the establishment of a panel of advisors to oversee the creation and maintenance of a set of 'Clinical Guidelines for Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction' which was first published in May, 2019.

He has worked tirelessly over this period during the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown to now establish this nonprofit, the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners, and this organization will now house most of the above body of work as education and training of Metabolic Health Practitioners and the entire community interested in making a difference in worldwide metabolic health.  The aim is to stall and reverse the increasing prevalence of noncommunicable, lifestyle related diseases, influenced by metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance.  Accreditation pathways have even been established for practitioners within this society to introduce credibility to the practice of therapeutic carbohydrate restriction and to help establish alternative Standard of Care for those whose metabolisms are different because they don’t eat excessive carbohydrates.

Doug Reynolds, MHP

Additional Members

Mariela Bastian,