David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD, is an expert medical reviewer of content on WebMD FIT and Raising FIT Kids. He is a pediatrician and researcher at Children’s Hospital Boston and holds the rank of professor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and professor of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. Since the early 1990s, he has provided medical care for several thousand overweight children and their families.
Ludwig is founding director of the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) program, one of the country’s largest multidisciplinary clinics for the care of overweight children. OWL is described by ChildMagazine as one of the most comprehensive pediatric obesity clinics in the country. He also directs the New Balance Foundation for Childhood Obesity Prevention, Clinical Research & Care at Children’s Hospital.
His research focuses on how food affects hormones, metabolism, and body weight. In particular, he has been developing a novel "low glycemic" diet (one that decreases the surge in blood sugar after meals) for the treatment of obesity and prevention of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. This work has been cited as providing a scientific basis for numerous popular diets, including the South Beach diet, the Zone diet, Sugar Busters, and the Glucose Revolution diet. His research is supported by major grants from the National Institutes of Health and from philanthropic foundations, and he has published more than 100 scientific articles.
Described as an "obesity warrior" by TIME magazine, Ludwig has fought for fundamental policy changes to restrict food advertising directed at young children, improve the quality of school nutrition programs, and increase insurance reimbursement for obesity prevention and treatment programs. He is a fellow of The Obesity Society and a recipient of the 2008 E.V. McCollum Award of the American Society for Nutrition. Ludwig is the author of Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World, a book on childhood obesity for parents. He appears frequently in national print publications and on broadcast media.