When a friend of mine first mentioned the carnivore diet to me, I thought he was kidding. Are people really only eating meat, and expecting to be healthy? It seemed like another fad diet geared at grabbing attention more than anything. After all, despite the many differences of various popular diets, the one thing we could all agree on is that eating vegetables is good for you. Not anymore. Since Dr. Shawn Baker popularized carnivore a few years ago, thousands of people report that their health and performance have improved on an all-meat, zero-carb diet. Trying to keep an open...

Imagine you’re a plant out in the wild. You’re soaking up sunshine and getting taller and greener by the day. You’re full of nutrients. Life is pretty good. The only trouble is these damn herbivores. Insects, deer, small woodland animals - they keep strolling in and eating your neighbors. If you aren’t careful, you’ll end up as lunch. What’s a smart plant to do? Plants go to great lengths to avoid getting eaten. Some turn to poison, although that doesn’t always work out; caffeine is a poison that happens to be very beneficial to humans. The coffee plant screwed up. And...

Your small intestine (gut) is home to trillions of bacteria from hundreds of different species. They compete, cooperate, grow, shrink, and engage in an intricate dance that keeps a healthy balance. Your gut bacteria influence your whole body. There’s a direct pathway between your gut and your brain, for example [1]. Gut bacteria can even influence body-wide fat storage [2]. Your gut biome’s widespread influence gives you a powerful opportunity to strengthen your whole body. The flip side of that, though, is that when your gut bacteria fall out of balance, you can see a broad range of effects. If...

Right now, as you read this, an entire ecosystem of bacteria is living in your gut. In fact, you might be more bacterium than human: we have about an equal number of bacteria and human cells, possibly skewed slightly in favor of the little visitors [1]. That sounds strange at first - maybe even alarming - but it’s actually a good thing. Researchers are fascinated by gut bacteria; since 2010 there have been more than 8500 studies on the genus Lactobacillus alone [2]. With all that research, it’s becoming clear that your unique collection of gut bacteria has a huge...