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

Recently our team received emails and messages from a few New York physical therapists. Their overall message was clear: you and your courses are wrong and that carnivore is the only way (along with other expletives). As a proud evidenced-based provider of nutritional continuing education, accept this as our reply and an outlining of why the carnivore diet is ridiculous and unsafe.

Origins

If you are not familiar with the carnivore diet let us explain it briefly, as there is much misinformation and pseudoscience surrounding it. The diet was originally developed by a German scientist in the 1800s. Derivations of this diet followed, such as the meat and hot water diet, with intentions of “curing” diseases like diabetes and chronic diarrhea. While well-intentioned, such diets never gained much traction until recently when an orthopedic surgeon named Shawn Baker decided to make it part of his brand. He wrote a book termed “T...