Medical Board

Patrick Hanaway, MD is a board-certified family physician trained at Washington University. Dr. Hanaway served on the Executive Committee for the American Board of Integrative Medicine and is Past President of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine. For the past 20 years, he has worked with his wife in clinical practice at Family to Family: Your Home for Whole Health Care in Asheville, NC.

After 10 years as Chief Medical Officer at Genova Diagnostics, Dr. Hanaway became the Chief Medical Education Officer at the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) where he oversaw the development and implementation of IFM’s programs worldwide. Patrick has taught with IFM since 2005 and continues to lead the GI Advanced Practice Module as well as teach in the mentorship program. His support for IFM includes Chair of the COVID task force, Co-Chair of the Expert Advisory Board, Senior advisor to the CEO.

In 2014, Dr. Hanaway helped develop the collaboration between IFM and the Cleveland Clinic, where he was the founding Medical Director, then Research Director and now serves as a Research Collaborator at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. His research interests focus on evaluating outcomes of functional medicine models of care.

In 2017, Patrick received the Linus Pauling Award for his outstanding work in medical education and research.

In 2018, Dr. Hanaway was diagnosed with Stage IV Laryngeal Cancer. His life has been transformed through an integrative therapeutic approach including nutrition, acupuncture, herbs, prayer, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, community support, and spending time in nature. Recent medical assessment demonstrates ‘No Evidence of Disease’.

Robert Lustig, MD is a Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. He has become a leading public health authority on the impact sugar has on fueling diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome epidemics, and on addressing changes in the food environment to reverse these chronic diseases.

In his New York Times best-selling book Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processes Food, Obesity, and Disease, Robert documents both the science and the politics that have led to the current pandemic of obesity and chronic disease. In the Fat Chance Cookbook, Robert provides practical examples for applying healthy eating principles with recipes by Cindy Gershen.

Dr. Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist, with basic and clinical training in hypothalamic development, anatomy, and function. Prior to coming to San Francisco in 2001, he worked at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. There, he was responsible for the endocrine care of many children whose hypothalami had been damaged by brain tumors or subsequent surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. Many patients who survived became massively obese. Dr. Lustig theorized that hypothalamic damage led to the inability to sense the hormone leptin, which in turn, led to the starvation response. Since repairing the hypothalamus was not an option, he looked downstream, noting that these patients had increased activity of the vagus nerve (a manifestation of starvation) which increased insulin secretion.

By administering the insulin suppressive agent octreotide, he was able to get them to lose weight; but more remarkably, they started to exercise spontaneously. He then demonstrated the same phenomenon in obese adults without CNS lesions.

The universality of these findings has enabled Dr. Lustig to develop a novel unifying hypothesis regarding the etiology, prevention, and treatment of the current obesity epidemic, and the role of our environment in the biochemical changes that promote weight gain. This has led him to explore the specific role of fructose (half of sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup) as a specific mediator of both chronic disease and continued caloric consumption.

His acclaimed YouTube video, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” continues its popularity with the lay public.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Lustig attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, and received his M.D. from Cornell University Medical College in 1980. He completed his pediatric residency at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in 1983 and his clinical fellowship at UCSF in 1984. From there, he spent six years as a post-doctoral fellow and research associate in neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University. He has also been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tennessee, Memphis. In 2013, Dr. Lustig received his Masters in the study of Law from University of California, Hastings to enable him to impact the food industry through policy change.

Dr. Lustig has authored 125 peer-reviewed articles and 73 reviews. He has mentored 20 pediatric endocrine fellows and trained numerous other allied health professionals. He provides endocrinologic support to several protocols of the Children’s Oncology Group. He is the former Chairman of the Ad hoc Obesity Task Force of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, a member of the Pediatric Obesity Practice Guidelines Subcommittee of The Endocrine Society, a member of the Obesity Task Force of the Endocrine Society, a member of the Pediatric Obesity Devices Committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a member of the Bay Area Board of Directors of the American Heart Association, and a member of the Steering Committee of Health Foods, Healthy Kids of the Culinary Institute of America. He also consults for several childhood obesity advocacy groups.

Dr. Lustig lives in San Francisco with his wife Julie and two daughters. In his spare time (what little there is), he enjoys cooking, theater-going, and traveling.