Episode 245: Dr. Laura Buchanan

Thank you for tuning in for another episode of Life’s Best Medicine. Dr. Laura Buchanan is a double board-certified physician in family and obesity medicine with a passion for using lifestyle modification as the first-line standard of care. She is a certified metabolic health practitioner (MHP), and a Board and founding member of the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners. She is also a certified Menopause Society Certified Practitioner (MSCP).

Given the improvement she has seen in patient’s mental health with low-carb diets, she also completed Dr. Georgia Ede’s “Ketogenic Diets for Mental Health Clinician Training”. She completed her family medicine residency at Wake Forest in 2022 and was a valedictorian of her class at the University of Florida College of Medicine.

In this episode, host Dr. Brian and Laura talk about…

(00:00) Intro
(03:34) How Dr. Laura first became interested in metabolic health and her research work at Toward Health
(06:11) Data and research on quality of life and mental health improvement for people on a keto diet
(08:04) How Alzheimer’s can improve on low-carb and ketogenic diets
(09:19) The prevalence of food addiction among obese and diabetic people
(10:43) Harm reduction versus abstinence strategies for dealing with food addiction
(14:15) Some harmful ingredients found in many keto and low-carb replacement foods
(17:10) Toward Health’s upcoming study on the improvement of binge eating and food addiction symptoms on a low carb diet
(20:55) Some strategies that can help people recover from binge eating and food addiction
(23:30) Night-Eating Syndrome
(26:37) The importance of community and engagement with people who can support you through your recovery and health journey
(29:16) The incredible findings of Toward Health’s employee wellness program study
(33:38) The economic/medical pros and cons of GLP-1 medications
(39:55) Sneaky sugars that most people are not aware of
(46:42) The key take-aways from Toward Health’s recent Employee Wellness study
(57:24) Outro and plugs

Thank you for listening!

The Life’s Best Medicine Podcast is sponsored by HLTH Code.