Candice Egnos: Learning to Leverage the Power of Low Carb to Treat Metabolic Health Conditions

Do you work in the healthcare space? Are you looking to expand your skills? 

In this week’s podcast episode, I sat down with Candice Egnos, Project Director of the Nutrition Network - an offshoot of the Noakes Foundation - to explore their incredible mission of training and certifying medical professionals in the safe and effective use of low-carb and ketogenic dietary interventions to treat metabolic and mental health conditions. With over 10,000 practitioners trained across 100+ countries, they are leaders in this educational space.

The timing of this podcast interview works amazingly well because it falls over their Black Friday sale which offers up to 75% off their certification courses. These courses are ideal for health coaches, nurses, nutritionists, dieticians, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. 

While the Nutrition Network recognizes that low-carb and ketogenic dietary interventions are just one of many strategies to support health outcomes, they strongly advocate for medical professionals to understand the science behind these approaches and acquire the skills to apply them when appropriate. It is becoming a critical core competency patients seek from their healthcare providers.

Episode Highlights:

• The vision behind Nutrition Network and its roots in the Noakes Foundation.
• Why therapeutic carbohydrate reduction is a game-changing tool for treating metabolic disorders.
• Courses tailored for everyone—from health coaches to dietitians to medical doctors.
• Insights into their globally recognized certifications, including a rigorous 16-week live mentorship program.
• The importance of personalized approaches to nutrition—no dogma, just results.
• Free resources, curated research, and a vibrant practitioner community.

Whether you're a medical professional, on the path of recovery from metabolic syndrome, or simply curious about TCR (Therapeutic Carbohydrate Reduction), this episode is packed with valuable insights and actionable steps.

Florence's courses & coaching programs can be found at:
www.FlorenceChristophers.com

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Chapters

• 0:01 Empowering Healthcare Through Nutrition Training
• 15:04 Exploring Ketogenic Nutrition and Benefits
• 21:47 Gratitude for Ketosis Advocacy

Transcript

Florence: 0:01

Welcome everybody to an interview today with Candice. Now, Candice, you have a stance, but do you have a? Did you recently get married? Do you have like another name as well?

Candice: 0:11

Ignace? Yeah, candice, ignace is my married name.

Florence: 0:14

Okay, got it, got it. So Candice works with the Nutrition Network. She's now the director, the project director, with the Nutrition Network, which is a sponsor of the Kick Sugar Summit this year, and her background is that she has a law degree and she also has a social sciences degree from Cape Town University. She's hailing right now and she's down in South Africa, and she originally worked with the Noakes Foundation and then, seven years ago, I believe, moved over to be a project lead in the Nutrition Network arm of the Noakes Foundation and then, seven years ago, I believe, moved over to be a project lead in the nutrition network arm of the Noakes Foundation. And what they do? What they do is what this interview is going to be about.

Florence: 0:53

They offer online courses that train practitioners all over the world. I think they've had over 6,000 people trained in over 100 countries and their tagline is I absolutely love changing healthcare one practitioner at a time, and they have courses that suit a wide variety of people working in the healthcare spaces, from, like nutritionists to dietitians, to health coaches, to doctors and scientists and researchers and like the whole gamut. It's a long list of different kinds of courses that you can take and their certifications, and they're recognized as the global leaders in this space. What else do I want to add? Their main focus is on the nutritional benefits of therapeutic carbohydrate reduction, so they work in the low carb, higher fat space or healthy fat space and the sort of ketogenic space. So that's kind of their niche. So welcome, candice.

Candice: 1:48

Thank you so much for having me, Florence. It's wonderful to be here.

Florence: 1:52

Yeah, I'm really, really excited for individuals to know about your foundation and what you do and how they can be a part of it and support it and learn from it and be a part of this really growing community of practitioners all over the world who are learning from each other, supporting each other, growing together, building, you know, clinical guidelines and, like it's unbelievable. They have this incredible forum where people are saying, okay, so I have this client and you know, and then a bunch of people will jump in and say, try this, or I've experienced this. It's absolutely incredible. It's the best of human collaboration in the healthcare space that I've seen. I think it's probably the best in the world. Would you say that?

Candice: 2:31

I would 100% agree. Yes, yeah, yeah. We have an amazing community of practitioners across all professions who are part of our community and network. And, yeah, just to be part of that shared knowledge space, it's wonderful.

Florence: 2:45

Yeah, so tell me a bit more about the vision and the mission of the Nutrition Network.

Candice: 2:56

So when we were back the NERCS Foundation days, it was almost daily that we were getting approached by patients, clients, just normal people who'd adopted the low-carb diet, the ketogenic diet, and they had seen incredible results and they were coming to us asking us to refer them to a low-carb friendly doctor.

Candice: 3:20

And we just didn't have any doctors within our network or anyone who we could confidently refer them to. So we realized that there was a need to train professionally medical practitioners in the science of therapeutic carbohydrate restriction and how they could use that knowledge to better serve their patients. So that's kind of how we came about. So our vision is to change health, healthcare, one practitioner at a time, and we aim to do that by bridging the gap between nutrition science so the science that is emerging every day, the papers that are being published, taking that information and translating it in an easily understandable way into medical practitioners and allied healthcare professionals. So, yeah, we want to kind of bridge that gap, to essentially empower medical professionals to better serve their patients and to essentially change the way metabolic diseases are managed, treated, reversed, prevented globally.

Florence: 4:27

Yeah, amazing, and it just occurred to me as you were talking that I imagine the lifestyle medicine doctors that are trained in whole food, plant-based. They have a huge community and tons of collaboration as well. But this is more specific to those who want to work with therapeutic carbohydrate reduction, just to kind of be clear about that. So tell me more about how that's been received by doctors and what sort of evidence clinical evidence is mounting that this is a very effective way of helping people to prevent, improve, treat, reverse metabolic syndrome symptoms.

Candice: 5:10

It's been received. It's exceeded all expectations. So we didn't really realize how big the need was until we released our first online training. We set goals for ourselves to reach maybe 30 medical doctors in month one and we ended up reaching 300. And we were surprised to learn that it wasn't South African doctors, which is where we're based, but it was doctors all over the world. So, as you mentioned earlier, we're in over 100 countries. Our courses have been translated in 10 different languages. Our courses have been translated in 10 different languages, yeah, and we almost have trained nearly 10,000 practitioners now to date.

Candice: 5:51

So we could never have anticipated that it would have grown so quickly and that so many doctors out there were searching for a way to better serve their patients.

Candice: 6:01

And it's gone past just medical doctors. So we very quickly learned that nurses were coming to us saying I want to help my patients and I just need the knowledge. I don't have that knowledge and dieticians in their practice. So we quickly expanded our training offering to cater to those dieticians nurses across the professions, physios, chiropractors all allied healthcare practitioners and very quickly we started to have non-medical practitioners asking us for training. So we realized that health coaches wanted to have keto within their knowledge base to offer to their clients. So we created a specific training for health coaches, which is our advisor training, to give them the knowledge and the tools to confidently and sustainably advise their clients on low carb and how to ensure that they see them through the whole journey with not only the theory behind the diet but also the coaching skills that they'll need to effectively take their clients through the journey of adopting low carb and making sure they sustain it and see results. So yeah, we've been overwhelmed by the response.

Florence: 7:17

Yes, and I have taken the health coach training. Amazing, I think I haven't finished it yet, but I got it started. And what's amazing, too, is that I what I really appreciate about your organization is is we're not there. Isn't this dogma one size fits all. Like people have different levels of of macros, like some people can do higher carb and some people need to go lower carb to go to get the results that they're looking for, the transformation that they're seeking, so it's just one tool in the toolbox.

Florence: 7:48

So people don't have to think that if they're a part of your organization, being really skilled at learning how to work with therapeutic carbohydrate reduction doesn't mean that you are in the camp that says that somebody wants to do whole food, plant-based or higher carbs like that's bad or wrong. It's just wants to do whole food, plant-based or higher carbs like that's bad or wrong. It's just. This is one powerful intervention that you can be skilled in and there might be the right client for whom this is exactly the path that they need at this time. And understanding that we're a bio-individual and that if you're missing this information and these skills and how to work with therapeutic carbohydrate reduction, you're going to be missing an intervention that can make a difference in clients' and patients' lives.

Candice: 8:30

Exactly, yeah, spot on, and we feel we've touched on it in some of our trainings. But we feel that as therapists, a practitioner, it's perhaps more ethical to have this as an option for your clients. If you've faced with a client who has come to you and said, look, I've adopted the ketogenic diet, I've seen amazing results, it's perhaps within your scope of practice or your duty as a doctor or a dietician to at least be familiar with the science and to be able to meet that patient where they're at and treat them as an individual. And if they're seeing great success on the diet and if all their markers are looking great, then yeah, we appreciate the perspective that you have, that it is just one offering that practitioners can have.

Florence: 9:21

Powerful one, and the more you get into it, the more you realize that it can be nothing short of a miracle. Tell us a bit about some of your courses, Like what are some courses that people can take? Some of your bestsellers.

Candice: 9:34

So we have a whole range of trainings. We've got 36 internationally CPD accredited. So CPD I know in the US you call it CME, cpd, yeah, so we've got 36 and counting online trainings on a variety of topics. So we recommend that if you are a lay person, so a non-medical practitioner you'd start with our advisor training, which covers the foundations of ketogenic theory but also essential coaching skills and from there you kind of equip with the knowledge to then take on our more medically focused trainings. If you were a medical practitioner, like a doctor or dietitian or nurse, we would recommend you start with our ketogenic training. So this covers everything you need to know from a foundational level of how to use therapeutic carbohydrate restriction or reduction, in clinical practice and a variety of use cases. So if you have a patient who is experiencing migraines or a patient with type 2 diabetes or food addiction, so we have a variety of use cases and applications for the diet and that's covered in our ketogenic training. And then we have a more advanced training which is kind of taking that knowledge to the next level, where we have a very heavy focus on not so much the theory but the practical application of the diet in practice when you're faced with a client or a patient. So that's very tools, resources, practical application focused.

Candice: 11:21

And then we also have a range of elective training. So we call them electives because they're smaller in size, they're around 10 hours of learning and these really hone in on a specific topic. So we cover cancer, obesity, diabetes, neurology, metabolic psychiatry. We've got a whole range of topics and what we've done is approach the various experts in their field on that particular topic and they have worked with our curriculum committee to develop the content and present the lecture and they kind of make up the lecturers on the course.

Candice: 12:05

So, yeah, have a variety of trainings on different topics. Whatever interests you, we probably have a training that covers it. And then, once you've done all of our online trainings, we do have a live certification training and that is an incredibly rigorous 16-week live training where you go really in depth into the science. You have a mentor For some people Professor Tim Noakes might be your mentor for that program. There's oral examinations and it's kind of like a degree going back to university. So once you acquire that certification, you become a certified nutrition network practitioner and that kind of signals that you've received the highest standard of training in therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, and we work very, very closely with our certified nutrition network practitioners. They kind of become part of our inner circle nutrition network practitioners.

Florence: 13:04

They kind of become part of our inner circle. Incredible, amazing, pardon me so, for someone who is an allied practitioner not necessarily a doctor or nurse or dietitian someone who's allied they can move with. They can start with the advisory and then they can move into the next level and then they can move into this ultimate level, like everyone can qualify to come into that 16-week live and get certified.

Candice: 13:26

Yeah, exactly. So we do have two slightly different channels where, if you're a non-medical practitioner, then the content is more coaching-based. So you'd follow a similar pathway, but the rigorous certification, live training at the end of the journey will be more focused towards coaching skills. Yeah, so that's how it differs.

Florence: 13:53

Yeah, so it's fine-tuned there and you also have a course, I understand, on lab work, understanding lab work. Is that correct?

Candice: 14:01

Yeah, we do cover that. Understanding lab work Is that correct? Yeah, we do cover that. That's obviously critically important when you're starting out your journey to get the relevant tests done. So you know the bench work and, as a practitioner, how to interpret that data. And along with the lectures, we have a host of resources and materials that students and members can use when they're in their clinical practice. For example, what are the perfect blood glucose ranges and what should you be looking for? And triglycerides what are the recommended ranges and what they mean, and how to take steps to adjust them to bring them within that normal range. So, yes, we do cover that topic.

Florence: 14:42

Yeah, yeah, and if and if yeah, and, like you just mentioned, if you go to the website nutrition hyphen network dot org is it, or okay? Um, you'll see there's tons of free resources too, like tons and tons. You can just tap into all of their shared knowledge. That's just free. You don't even have to sign up for a course. Yeah, you can spend hours, hours there.

Candice: 15:04

And we've also got our reference directory. So if you go to our website you'll see we've got a curation of the top scientific studies that have been published in low-carbon ketogenic nutrition and we've kind of created a listing based on different topics. So if you want to know what the science around cancer research and therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, we've taken the top 10 most robust studies that have been published in a curated list for you. So we've kind of synthesized the research so it's more accessible for everyone.

Florence: 15:43

We've kind of synthesized the research, so it's more accessible for everyone. What do?

Candice: 16:00

you want people to know and understand about working with protocols that help people to safely and effectively reduce carbohydrates.

Candice: 16:03

So I'm not a medical practitioner, so I think, understanding that each person is different and that if you're confronted with a non-typical use case, we do have our community platform where you could go and post your question and ask for advice if you're struggling with a particular case, and we've got a whole network of medical practitioners who will weigh in and offer advice and offer recommendations.

Candice: 16:33

But it's a generally safe diet to be promoting because essentially, at the end of the day, what we're saying is that people should go back to eating whole foods. That's kind of the underlying principle that we keep promoting. Promoting is that we need to get away from the refined carbohydrates, the sugars, the ultra processed foods and going back to eating whole foods. So, in terms of protocols, it's a safe, safe thing that we're promoting and obviously they're going to be varying degrees depending on the patient that you confronted with or the coach that you confronted with, but we have enough resources and information contained in our courses and on our website and in our community should there ever be any particular new kind of use case.

Florence: 17:27

Okay, I feel like I'm sort of out of my questions, but is there anything more you want to add or tell us about the Nutrition Network to help us appreciate what you're doing and how we can be a part of it and how we can support it?

Candice: 17:40

So we just recommend visiting our website.

Candice: 17:44

You can join our community.

Candice: 17:46

So we've got a free online community that anyone can join, and it's an incredibly rich, dynamic environment where you've got people from all over the world who have an interest in this information and, whether it's personally or they're a health coach or just getting started on their health coaching journey, we have everyone from all walks of life who are part of our community, and the information sharing, the knowledge, sharing the support that we see there is just incredible.

Candice: 18:17

So I really encourage anyone who's interested, or at least has an interest, in ketogenic diets, or if there's a medical practitioner out there who wants to include this in their offering and their practice, I really recommend you get started with, maybe one of our free courses. So we've got a variety of free trainings that people can just sample and if it interests them, then you can take it further. But we're very much in the interest of sharing this information and getting as many people on board and just aware of the benefits of this diet and the remarkable impact that it can have on people's lives, and so, yeah, we just want to empower as many people with this knowledge, with the aim to essentially change the way healthcare is approached and the way diseases are reversed and managed.

Florence: 19:11

The power of the food first. And I want to just add, as a migraineur, someone who had her first migraine at three at least that's my mom's earliest memory of me crying and holding my head and her taking me to the doctor and the doctor saying, oh, I think she just has a headache. Well, little did we know they. Would you know they would morph into one of the most horrific forms of pain I could ever imagine a human being experiencing, and how unbelievably tied they are to grains and spikes and valleys. The blood rollercoaster, blood sugar rollercoaster. I mean I wish I hadn't known then what I know now. I would have spared myself many, many, many weekends in the dark wanting to die. It was so awful many many, many weekends in the dark, wanting to die.

Florence: 19:56

It was so awful, but it's just the beginning. It's terrible, but it's just. It's just the beginning of the different ways how some of us are biochemically and physiologically sensitive to carbohydrates, not even just the ones that are refined and processed, Just generally speaking. We're sensitive to the rise and the falls, and and so this diet is is often very misunderstood. The keto diet is often seen as like oh, big giant burgers and cheddar cheese and bacon and guacamole on top with the side of pork rinds. Like that would kill me. Like that I love that. Other people can do that, but that's not. That's not what nutritional ketosis is about. It's a misunderstanding. And there's people who can do this vegan and vegetarian and Mediterranean, Like there's just. It's a. It's a new, it's a physiological state of burning ketones. It's another complimentary and very essential form of fuel for the body that gets blocked off when we're constantly carb burning, like sugar burning, and it's it's so.

Florence: 20:53

I think when people start to dig into it, they go, oh, this isn't what I thought it was, and there's so many ways to do it right and there's some ways to do it wrong for our bodies. What someone else can do might be a disaster for someone else, and it isn't the diet that's failing them, it's the misunderstanding of all the different ways that we can play with this to make it work for people. Yeah, exactly, Okay, Awesome. Well, there's my passionate, shameless plug for everybody everybody to go check out their website, nutrition-networkorg, and Candice has generously offered a 30% off discount code that we'll put in the show notes under this interview to anyone who's wanting to take, get certification, become a part of this community, learn more, open your mind, get confident in using the state. You know nutritional ketosis as a very powerful intervention in a wide variety of metabolic and mental health issues. So thanks, Thanks, Candice, for your time, for all the work you're doing, Thanks, South African Professor Noakes. You've taken the lead and we're so grateful.

Candice: 22:03

Thank you so much, Florence. It's been wonderful to talk to you.

Florence: 22:07

Thanks everybody for tuning in. Bye-bye, bye-bye.