For the last several decades low carb advocates have pitched their diet as means to weight loss, better glycemic control, and even life extension. Many avid fans, like Noakes and Attia, have thrown around several low level studies or short term studies to support the low carb dietary pattern. Meanwhile, the data for more plant focused, carb rich diets like the Mediterranean and Whole food plant based diets have been gleaning more and more support. From prospective trials to population and epidemiology data, such plant focused diets seem to be the ideal pattern for physical therapists (PTs) to recommend to many clients. Let's take a look a recent National Institute of Health (NIH) trial comparing a low carb animal based diet to a high carb plant focused diet.

Published in Nature Medicine, the NIH trial was relatively small and focused on short term results. Researchers housed the participants in a NIH controlled facility, proving to increase the internal validity and controls of the...

Emerging evidence is revealing how Vitamin D can help patients with COVID-19, commonly known as the Coronavirus.  Vitamin D is known as the "sunshine vitamin" as it is produced in the skin with sun exposure. Most Americans are deficient in Vitamin D, possibly due to the lack of optimal sun exposure and/or their poor diets. In order to get peak Vitamin D levels from sun exposure, a person must remain in direct sun with most the body exposed for 20 minutes under peak sun (usually 11am to 1pm). Vitamin D can be found as a fortification in many foods such as cereals, dairy milk, plant-based milks, while it is found naturally in some mushrooms. The specific Vitamin D in focus would be D3, also known as cholecalciferol.

So what's the data on Vitamin D and COVID-19? Well, randomized trials and cross sectional studies have shown that ~60% of patients with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient upon hospitalization, with men in the advanced stages of COVID-19 pneumonia showing the greatest...

The holidays are here and our clients are busy hanging decorations and eating lots of holiday food. Most of this holiday food is loaded with extra calories from added sugars, fat, and processed junk. After climbing their ladders, lifting the boxes, and the stress of traveling and seeing family, they come crawling into our clinics or gyms with extra weight and a sore back.

What can we do as Doctors of Physical Therapy (DPTs)? Aside from our traditional physical therapy treatments like manual therapy and exercise, we should be using patient education for weight loss. Here are some of our top tips for PTs and weight loss.

Journal Your Foods

Holidays bring big emotions and lots of junk food. Many of this junk food is eaten without our clients' being aware they are eating hundreds, if not thousands, of extra calories. These calories add up quickly promoting weight gain, reducing glycemic control, and stimulating inflammation.

To improve your PT outcomes and shed some pounds, data...

By Dr. Sean M. Wells, DPT, PT, OCS, ATC/L, CSCS, NSCA-CPT, CNPT, Cert-DN

If you were reading the news last week then you might have seen an article that sounds something like: "Good News, Meat May Protect You from Heart Disease." While this sounds exciting and promising, many of the published media articles just don't dive into the science enough to give citizens and clinicians an educated viewpoints. Let's examine the new evidence, its science, and what impact it should have on physical therapy practice.

The Article

The main research paper the media is slinging around can be found in mSystems, an open access journal. The authors, Kivenson and Giovanni, published the paper title An Expanded Genetic Code Enables Trimethylamine Metabolism in Human Gut Bacteria, which full-text can be found here. Both Kivenson and Giovanni are researchers at Oregon State University and their primary focus is in microbiology.

mSystems is a relatively new journal. Overall it has an impact factor of 6.28...