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...

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...