Foundations of CrossFit Health

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ByCrossFitJanuary 11, 2019

Welcome to CrossFit Health!

CrossFit Health (CFH) isn’t about your health.

CrossFit Health is an investigation into the ills of modern medicine and the willful abuse of the public’s trust in science. What would motivate such an inquiry? And what are our qualifications to put forth on the subject?

Nearly 20 years ago, in an article titled “What Is Fitness?” CrossFit articulated the physiological reality that what we eat and how we exercise—fundamentally lifestyle choices—are the independent variables in control of the dependent variables measured by medicine as manifestation, predictor or cause of chronic disease. These dependent variables include triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein, A1C, blood pressure, body fat, bone density and muscle mass.

A business was seeded and a global fitness and health revolution sprouted from a prescription of constantly varied, high-intensity functional movement leveraged by meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar.

The certainty and fidelity with which that prescription increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains while improving all health metrics have been the driving force for the success of CrossFit and CrossFitters. That revolution comprises 14,500 CrossFit Affiliate gyms around the world, 132,000 credentialed CrossFit trainers and millions of CrossFit devotees. Within that group are the CrossFit physicians, numbering over 20,000 in the U.S. alone.

The inexorable rise of chronic disease, which is taking 70 percent of lives needlessly and prematurely, has two root causes: excess carbohydrate consumption and sedentarism. From the onset of this epidemic, official response from our universities, our government institutes of health and our very own doctors was to promote a high-carb, low-fat, margarine-greased descent into ever-worsening disease and death. Little has changed in decades beyond worsening global health and CrossFit’s ascendancy.

The CrossFit physicians are by virtue of medical training and CrossFit participation uniquely poised to offer meaningful public discourse on what has gone so tragically wrong. They sit in possession of a view of health, metabolism and exercise that is neither mainstream nor traditional yet entirely correct and vitally important—perhaps essential. CrossFit has been right for a long time, and they know it.

That we were correct and stood in direct opposition to a powerful coalition of authority, credentials and money was tough for many to accept and profoundly uncomfortable for them to explain. But harder to believe and more difficult to accept was the decade-long crusade against CrossFit by organized and academic fitness “science” with legislation, litigation, lies, scientific misconduct in the form of falsification and fabrication of data, and, finally, felonies in the form of perjury and likely spoliation of evidence. These claims can be found in the words of jurists’ published rulings.

The lessons learned from the legal dismantling of fake science, a crooked journal and perjuring scientists have given us a forensic view as to how everything might have gone so wrong. We’re calling the combination of runaway medical costs and disease rates—which many profit from but none combat effectively—“The Mess.”

CrossFit Health is an ongoing exploration of The Mess.


As a project of CrossFit Health, the CrossFit Medical Doctor Level 1 Seminar format (CFMDL1) was conceived as a means to network medical doctors within the CrossFit community who share an essential, non-trivial view regarding the role of lifestyle choices in chronic disease. The clarity with which these doctors see cause and effect places them at odds with the dominant paradigm in medicine of symptomatic treatment of chronic disease via pharma and procedures. To learn more about the CFMDL1, please email info@crossfithealth.com.