The Carnivore Diet – Heal Your Gut and Lower Inflammation

The Challenges of a Healthy Diet

Recently, I had just about every belief I held about nutrition challenged, and now I feel it is time to write a bit about it.  For sixteen years, I have been a student of nutrition, learning the conventional government issued suggestions first, followed by many different opinions, branches, diets and theories from arguably some of the greatest minds in the last 100 years. I have looked at ideal nutrition from a macroscopic population base, to how different blood types, gene variations, and other factors affect what foods are optimal, and even looking at time of year, location food is grown in relation to you, and how much sunlight and at what altitude you live for optimal nutrition.  I have listened to hundreds of hours of lectures, podcasts, and read hundreds of books and scientific papers on nutrition.  I have personally experimented with my own body with many of these recommendations, and also introduced the concepts to patients with the evidence to support these concepts. In all this time, the carnivore diet was never considered as healthy nutrition. There have been many positives and lives changed for the better, but there have also been many frustrations, setbacks, and disappointments.  As of 2 months ago, I was taking personally about 15 different supplements regularly, and alternating some in to maybe 20-25 at one time.  They helped me perform better, I could feel the difference, and I would regularly recommend many supplements to patients in addition to dietary changes.

The majority of these supplement recommendations revolve around 2 simple principles:

1. Most westerners need to heal their gut

2. Poor diet and a damaged gut causes most westerners to have – chronic excessive inflammation

Treating most people across the board with this assumption and working within their belief system, we could usually make some very positive changes with minor adjustments to the diet, and seemingly miraculous changes for some willing to go a little further.  

The Carnivore Diet – A Health Tool to Heal Your Gut and lower inflammation

About 2 months ago, my good friend and someone I have always seen as on the cutting edge of nutritional science, Doug Smith, said he had been eating nothing but meat for 2 months.  If you know Doug, you know there would obviously be some intense logic and science behind the decision.  As we were rock climbing, we covered a lot of the major concepts in about 2 hours, with the conclusion being that I was skeptic but open to the trying it myself.  I have been eating nothing but meat and animal products with a few cheats like red wine, tequila, and a handful of blueberries one night after the tequila.  Zero fiber, zero supplements, and zero plants.  I can say the results and the research along the way have completely shifted my thinking about everything I ever thought I knew about nutrition. I am now past most cravings for anything but fatty meat, and continue to feel healthier and healthier than I ever have before.  A few weeks into this experiment, I had a major health challenge and had to make a decision to stay with it or to change.  I fell about 30 feet while rock climbing and broke my ankle in 2 places.  After doing some research I found people who had rapidly healed from surgery and other traumatic events, so decided it was safe to stay with it and avoided taking all the supplements I would normally have turned to or guided patients to.  My experience has been one of the most rapid recoveries I have ever witnessed in bone and joint healing, and it was my own experience.  At 6 weeks to the day now, I am walking around on my (mostly) healed ankle, adjusting patients all day, and feeling only a minor hint that anything was ever wrong. This major dietary breakthrough comes with some frustration that it wasn’t included in my newly released book “The Power to Heal.”  It tells me there is now the need for an updated second edition including the latest ‘carnivore’ research, theories, and evidence.  I will surely be writing more about this but wanted to share my personal experience and support for the carnivore diet as a health tool to lower inflammation, heal the gut, and restore your vitality.