Jordan Peterson and daughter swear by carnivore diet
For those familiar with the world of Jordan Peterson, it may come as no surprise that he is a red-blooded carnivore.
I do not mean that as some kind of intellectual metaphor. Yes, the Canadian psychology professor turned lifestyle guru to millions of young men worldwide has always regarded intellectual pursuits as something of a blood sport, but now he has become evangelical about his diet.
“I eat beef, salt and water. That’s it,” he says. Or, rather, meat seasoned with the controversy he finds so appetising.
Peterson has joined the new fashion for a “carnivore” diet, claiming it saved him from his lifelong depression.
“I need less sleep. I’m not anxious, not depressed,” Peterson said last month with the air of someone reeling from a miracle, and in fact the beef and water diet is so ascetic as to feel semi-religious. “I am intellectually at my very best at the moment. The depression is gone.”
Mikhaila Peterson is Jordan Peterson’s 26-year-old daughter and the inspiration for his radical diet. She has an Instagram account subtitled “Beef, salt, water and bourbon = cured” and a food blog called Don’t Eat That, subtitled “Many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone”, in which she chronicles her and her father’s remarkable recovery from depression and anxiety. He now wakes without a feeling of doom, she reports jubilantly, and adds, in Peterson defiance mode, “F..k you, world — we won.”
This all makes Mikhaila Peterson the poster girl for the carnivore-diet movement, gaining traction among a similar crowd who already idolise Jordan, the highly influential bestselling author of 12 Rules for Life, whose YouTube videos have been viewed more than 50 million times.
Mikhaila Peterson also has done a lot of YouTube interviews. Yet what I find so appealing when I talk to her is that she knows that what she is doing sounds weird and can laugh about it.
“Sounds absolutely insane,” she says, and she knows there is no medical evidence to back it up. She laughs when I say her family has become “reluctantly kooky”.
“Yes. Totally. I was always really sceptical about diet. I thought it was for silly Californian girls. My father certainly did not want to get into this. He was always against diet as a solution because there was no hard scientific evidence linking to diet. At the beginning he was, like, ‘I’m not even going to mention this — it’s too weird.’ Now I’m literally eating the most extreme diet I’ve ever heard of. It’s absurd.” She laughs again.
She looks gorgeously healthy and has a daughter who is nearly one year old (and, by the way, survives only on meat and breast milk), but from infancy Mikhaila Peterson was very ill. She had severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that degenerated to the point that she had to have a hip and ankle replacement at the age of 17 and suffered chronic, severe pain.
Given new research into the link between depression and inflammation, it’s no surprise that, as a sufferer of an inflammatory illness, she developed depression in her late teens. It became so crippling that she could not finish university. She became “desperate to try anything” and began eliminating food groups. She remembers typing “allergic to everything” into Google. Then “allergic to everything except meat”. She discovered “beef is what makes me feel the best”. She fries strips of it with “just salt. Pepper doesn’t work.” Not even a few grains of pepper? Some tea? “No,” she says. “Nothing else. Just sparkling water.”
She reports that since January her depression and arthritis have resolved. Her doctors, she says, believe the results are a “placebo effect”. But she says her microbiome is unsuited to anything other than meat. She knows this goes against every “eat your greens” dietary guideline — “Completely, yes.”
Emma Morano was one of the longest living women in history; she died at 117, cheerful to the last. Her diet was surprising. She subsisted on biscuits and three eggs a day and, when she turned 100, added raw mince with a little pasta. She was famed for her good cheer, so is not a great example for the “anti-inflammatory” diet proponents, but Valter Longo likes to tell her story anyway.
Longo is the director of the University of Southern California Longevity Institute and the author of The Longevity Diet. He is famous for his research into fasting, diet and longevity. “Meat is nearly absent from the diet of the longest lived people in the world,” he says. Sardinians traditionally eat meat less than once a week, “and lead long, very happy lives”.
From what we know, Longo says, “a diet with a lot of meat is the worst” and as a result he gave it up decades ago. However, he acknowledges that individuals such as Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson, “with a particular genetic condition”, can buck the trend.
Longo says there’s a twist, though. Research shows that a low-protein diet is good for you up until the age of 65, he says. Then your inflammatory response to meat seems to drop, and the protein and iron may be useful. As an Italian, Longo is a friend of Morano’s doctor, Carlo Bava. It was Bava who suggested to Morano that she up her meat intake in her second century. “When you get to 100, meat may start to be a really good idea.”
Geoff 1 HOUR AGO
I actually put that diet down to ONE of the factors that helped me conquer cancer in my early 30’s - I am 65 now, healthy and cancer free - but I do also eat meat... yummy yummy meat!
Andrea 3 HOURS AGO
It has to do with methylation at the cellular level. Under-methylators need more meat and less greens; over-methylators need no meat and mainly plants. 70% of us are normal methylators, remaining 30% are either under or over.
Steve 2 HOURS AGO
My Grandfather, a doctor himself, would often say at the start of a meal, after grace.
'Meat maketh Man'.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/clever-guts-carnivore/news-story/92a72cb3e525b78fa8256083bbf39202
By HELEN RUMBELOW
THE TIMES
12:00AM AUGUST 10, 2018
184 COMMENTS
For those familiar with the world of Jordan Peterson, it may come as no surprise that he is a red-blooded carnivore.
I do not mean that as some kind of intellectual metaphor. Yes, the Canadian psychology professor turned lifestyle guru to millions of young men worldwide has always regarded intellectual pursuits as something of a blood sport, but now he has become evangelical about his diet.
“I eat beef, salt and water. That’s it,” he says. Or, rather, meat seasoned with the controversy he finds so appetising.
Peterson has joined the new fashion for a “carnivore” diet, claiming it saved him from his lifelong depression.
“I need less sleep. I’m not anxious, not depressed,” Peterson said last month with the air of someone reeling from a miracle, and in fact the beef and water diet is so ascetic as to feel semi-religious. “I am intellectually at my very best at the moment. The depression is gone.”
Mikhaila Peterson is Jordan Peterson’s 26-year-old daughter and the inspiration for his radical diet. She has an Instagram account subtitled “Beef, salt, water and bourbon = cured” and a food blog called Don’t Eat That, subtitled “Many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone”, in which she chronicles her and her father’s remarkable recovery from depression and anxiety. He now wakes without a feeling of doom, she reports jubilantly, and adds, in Peterson defiance mode, “F..k you, world — we won.”
This all makes Mikhaila Peterson the poster girl for the carnivore-diet movement, gaining traction among a similar crowd who already idolise Jordan, the highly influential bestselling author of 12 Rules for Life, whose YouTube videos have been viewed more than 50 million times.
Mikhaila Peterson also has done a lot of YouTube interviews. Yet what I find so appealing when I talk to her is that she knows that what she is doing sounds weird and can laugh about it.
“Sounds absolutely insane,” she says, and she knows there is no medical evidence to back it up. She laughs when I say her family has become “reluctantly kooky”.
“Yes. Totally. I was always really sceptical about diet. I thought it was for silly Californian girls. My father certainly did not want to get into this. He was always against diet as a solution because there was no hard scientific evidence linking to diet. At the beginning he was, like, ‘I’m not even going to mention this — it’s too weird.’ Now I’m literally eating the most extreme diet I’ve ever heard of. It’s absurd.” She laughs again.
She looks gorgeously healthy and has a daughter who is nearly one year old (and, by the way, survives only on meat and breast milk), but from infancy Mikhaila Peterson was very ill. She had severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that degenerated to the point that she had to have a hip and ankle replacement at the age of 17 and suffered chronic, severe pain.
Given new research into the link between depression and inflammation, it’s no surprise that, as a sufferer of an inflammatory illness, she developed depression in her late teens. It became so crippling that she could not finish university. She became “desperate to try anything” and began eliminating food groups. She remembers typing “allergic to everything” into Google. Then “allergic to everything except meat”. She discovered “beef is what makes me feel the best”. She fries strips of it with “just salt. Pepper doesn’t work.” Not even a few grains of pepper? Some tea? “No,” she says. “Nothing else. Just sparkling water.”
She reports that since January her depression and arthritis have resolved. Her doctors, she says, believe the results are a “placebo effect”. But she says her microbiome is unsuited to anything other than meat. She knows this goes against every “eat your greens” dietary guideline — “Completely, yes.”
Emma Morano was one of the longest living women in history; she died at 117, cheerful to the last. Her diet was surprising. She subsisted on biscuits and three eggs a day and, when she turned 100, added raw mince with a little pasta. She was famed for her good cheer, so is not a great example for the “anti-inflammatory” diet proponents, but Valter Longo likes to tell her story anyway.
Longo is the director of the University of Southern California Longevity Institute and the author of The Longevity Diet. He is famous for his research into fasting, diet and longevity. “Meat is nearly absent from the diet of the longest lived people in the world,” he says. Sardinians traditionally eat meat less than once a week, “and lead long, very happy lives”.
From what we know, Longo says, “a diet with a lot of meat is the worst” and as a result he gave it up decades ago. However, he acknowledges that individuals such as Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson, “with a particular genetic condition”, can buck the trend.
Longo says there’s a twist, though. Research shows that a low-protein diet is good for you up until the age of 65, he says. Then your inflammatory response to meat seems to drop, and the protein and iron may be useful. As an Italian, Longo is a friend of Morano’s doctor, Carlo Bava. It was Bava who suggested to Morano that she up her meat intake in her second century. “When you get to 100, meat may start to be a really good idea.”
Geoff 1 HOUR AGO
I actually put that diet down to ONE of the factors that helped me conquer cancer in my early 30’s - I am 65 now, healthy and cancer free - but I do also eat meat... yummy yummy meat!
Andrea 3 HOURS AGO
It has to do with methylation at the cellular level. Under-methylators need more meat and less greens; over-methylators need no meat and mainly plants. 70% of us are normal methylators, remaining 30% are either under or over.
Steve 2 HOURS AGO
My Grandfather, a doctor himself, would often say at the start of a meal, after grace.
'Meat maketh Man'.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/clever-guts-carnivore/news-story/92a72cb3e525b78fa8256083bbf39202
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