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THE JORDAN PETERSON ALL-
MEAT DIET
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e famous psychologist and his daughter swear by a regimen of eating

only beef. Restriction can provide a sense of order in a world of chaos
—but at what point does restriction become a disorder?

By James Hamblin

AUGUST 28, 2018 SHARE

“I
  ridiculous it sounds,” Mikhaila Peterson told me
recently by phone, after a whirlwind of attention gathered around
the 26-year-old, who is now offering dietary advice to people
suffering with conditions like hers. Or not so much dietary advice as guiding
people in eating only beef.

At rst glance, Peterson, who is based in Toronto, could seem to be one of the
many emerging semi-celebrities with a miraculous story of self-healing—who
show off postpartum weight loss in bikini Instagrams and sell one thing or
another, a supplement or tonic or book or compression garment. (Not
incidentally, she is the daughter of the famous and controversial pop
psychologist Jordan Peterson. More on that later.) But Peterson is taking the
trend in extra-professional health advice to an extreme conclusion: She is not
doing sponsored posts for health products, but actively selling one-on-one
counseling ($75 for a half hour) for people who want to stop eating almost
everything.

Peterson seems to be reaching suffering people despite a lack of training or

credentials in nutrition or medicine, and perhaps because of that distinction.
Her Instagram bio: “For info on treating weight loss, depression, and
autoimmune disorders with diet, check out my blog or fb page!” e blog,
which is called “Don’t Eat at,” says at the top that “many (if not most)
health problems are treatable with diet alone.” is is true, if at odds with the
disclaimer at the bottom of the page that her words are “not intended to be a
substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.”

I told her I’m surprised people need further counseling, in that an all-beef diet
is very straightforward.

“ey mostly want to see that I’m not dead,” she said. “What I basically do is
say, ‘Hey, look at all the things that happened to me and brought me to where
I am now. Isn’t it weird?’ And then let people draw their own conclusions.”

Peterson described an adolescence that involved RECOMMENDED READING

multiple debilitating medical diagnoses, beginning with
juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Some unknown process A Breakthrough in the
had triggered her body’s immune system to attack her Mystery of Why Women Get
So Many Autoimmune
joints. e joint problems culminated in hip and ankle Diseases
replacements in her teens, coupled with “extreme OLGA KHAZAN
fatigue, depression and anxiety, brain fog, and sleep
problems.” In fth grade she was diagnosed with
How to Trick People Into
depression, and then later something called idiopathic Saving Money
hypersomnia (which translates to English as “sleeping ROB WALKER

too much, of unclear cause”—which translates further

to sorry we really don’t know what’s going on).
Why the British Tell Better
Everything the doctors tried failed, and she did Children’s Stories
COLLEEN GILLARD
everything they told her, she recounted to me. She fully
bought into the system, taking large doses of strong
immune-suppressing drugs like methotrexate.*

Her story took a dramatic turn in 2015, when the underdog protagonist,
nearly at the end of her rope, gured out the truth for herself. It was all about
food.

Peterson adopted a common approach to dieting: elimination. She started

cutting out foods from her diet, and feeling better each time. She began with
gluten, and she kept going, casting out more and more—not just gluten or
dairy or soy or lectins or arti cial sweeteners or non-arti cial sweeteners, but
everything. Until, by December 2017, all that was left was “beef and salt and
water,” and, she told me, “all my symptoms went into remission.”

“And you quit taking all your medications?”

“Everything.”

T
   much evidence—abundant, copious evidence acquired
over decades of work from scientists around the world—that most
people bene t from eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and seeds.
is appears to be largely because ber in plants is important to the
ourishing of the gut microbiome. I ran this by some experts, just to make
sure I wasn’t missing anything that might suggest a beef-salt diet is potentially
something other than a bad idea. I learned that it was worse than I thought.

“Physiologically, it would just be an immensely bad idea,” Jack Gilbert, the

faculty director at the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center and a
professor of surgery, told me during a recent visit to his lab. “A terribly,
terribly bad idea.”

Gilbert has done extensive research on how the trillions of microbes in our
guts digest food, and the look on his face when I told him about the all-beef
diet was unamused. He began rattling off the expected rami cations: “Your
body would start to have severe dysregulation, within six months, of the
majority of the processes that deal with metabolism; you would have no short-
chain fatty acids in your cells; most of the by-products of gastrointestinal
polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldn’t be able to
regulate your hormone levels; you’d enter into cardiac issues due to alterations
in cell receptors; your microbiota would just be devastated.”

While much of the internet has been following this story in a somewhat snide
way, Gilbert appeared genuinely concerned and saddened: “If she does not die
of colon cancer or some other severe cardiometabolic disease, the life—I can’t
imagine.”

ere are few accounts of people having tried all-beef diets, though all-meat—
known as carnivory—is slightly more common. Earlier this month, inspired
by the media conversation about the Peterson approach, Alan Levinovitz, the
author of e Gluten Lie, tried carnivory, eating only meat for two weeks. He
did lose seven pounds, which he attributes to eating fewer calories overall,
because he eventually got tired of eating only meat. He missed snacking at
coffee shops and browsing the local farmer’s market and trying out new
restaurants around town, cooking with his family, and just generally enjoying
food.

“I was psychologically exhausted,” Levinovitz told me. When he returned to

omnivory, he regained the lost weight in four days.

Peterson told me it took several weeks for her to get used to the beef-only
approach, and that the relief of her medical symptoms overpowers any sense
of missing food. If even a tiny amount of anything else nds its way into her
mouth, she will be ill, she says. is happened when she tried to eat an
organic olive, and again recently when she was at a restaurant that put pepper
on her steak.

“I was like, whatever, it’s just pepper,” she told me. en she had a reaction
that lasted three weeks and included joint pain, acne, and anxiety.

Apart from having to exist in a world where the possibility of pepper exposure
looms, the only other social downside she notices is that she hates asking
people to accommodate her diet. So she will usually eat before she goes to a
dinner party, she told me, “but then I’ll go drink and enjoy the party.”

“Drink, as in, water?”

“I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.”

e idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is

among the few things that Peterson’s body will tolerate may be illuminating. It
implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the
substances ingested can be less important than the eater’s conceptualizations
of them—as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What’s actually
therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.

For centuries, ascetics have found enlightenment through acts of deprivation.

As Levinovitz, who is an associate professor of religion at James Madison
University, explained to me, the Daoist text the Zhuangzi describes “a spirit
man” who lives in the mountains and rides dragons and subsists only on air
and dew. “ere’s an anti-authoritarian bent to pop-culture wisdom, and a
part of that is dealing with food taboos, which are handed down by
authorities,” Levinovitz said. “ose are government now, instead of religious.
And because they are wrong so often—or, at least, apparently wrong—that’s a
good place to go when carving out your own area of authority. If you just eat
the ‘wrong’ foods and don’t die, that’s a ritual way to prove that you go against
conventional wisdom.”

Peterson’s narrative ts a classic archetype of an outsider who beat the game

and healed thyself despite the odds and against the recommendations of the
establishment. Her story is her truth, and it can’t be explained; you have to
believe. And unlike the many studies that have been done to understand the
diets of the longest-lived, healthiest people in history, or the randomized trials
that are used to determine which health interventions are safe and effective for
whom, her story is clear and dramatic. It’s right there in her photos; it has a
face and a name to prove that no odds are too long for one determined person
to overcome.

e bene cial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps explain and
give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It is well
documented that the immune system (and, so, autoimmune diseases) are
modulated by our lifestyles—from how much we sleep and move to how well
we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also
modulated by stress, which tends to be a by-product of a perceived lack of
control or order.

If strict dietary rules provide a sense of control and order, then Peterson’s
approach is emblematic of the trend in elimination dieting taken to an
extreme: Avoid basically everything. is verges into the realm of an eating
disorder. e National Eating Disorder Association lists among common
symptoms “refusal to eat certain foods, progressing to restrictions against
whole categories of food.” In the early phases of disordered eating, as with
bipolar disorder or alcoholism, a person may look and feel great. ey may
thrive for months or even years. But this fades. What’s more, the temporary
relief from anxiety may mean that the source of the anxiety goes unsought and
unaddressed.

I asked Peterson about the possibility that she may be enabling people with
eating disorders. She said she would draw a line if a client were underweight
or inducing vomiting. Otherwise, “it’s extremely disrespectful to people with
health issues caused by food to be lumped into the same category as people
with eating disorders. More of the same ‘blame the patient’ stuff that doctors
and health professionals already do.”

T
  of Peterson’s narrative is explained by more than its
timeless tropes; it has also been ampli ed by the fact that her father
has occasionally cast his spotlight onto her story. Jordan Peterson’s
recent book, Twelve Rules for Life, includes the story of his daughter’s health
trials. e elder Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, could at
rst seem an unlikely face for acceptance of personal, subjective truth, as he
regularly professes the importance of acting as purely as possible according to
rigorous analysis of data. He argued in a recent video that American
universities are the home to “ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective,
that all sex differences are socially constructed, and that Western imperialism
is the sole source of all ird World problems.” In his book, he writes that
academic institutions are teaching children to be “brainwashed victims,” and
that “the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them
straight.”

It is on grounds of his interpretation of income data, for example, that he has

spoken out against the idea of a wage gap between men and women being
unfair, as it can be explained away by biological factors associated with certain
personality traits that are more valuable in the capitalist marketplace. From
arguments from social-science evidence, he has expressed uncertainty that
lesbian couples can raise children without a male father gure. And it is
academic evidence that leads him to write in his book that “the so-called
patriarchy” is “an arbitrary cultural artifact.”

Yet in a July appearance on the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan

Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate
everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two
months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his
diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong
depression, anxiety, gastric re ux (and associated snoring), inability to wake
up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, oaters in his right eye, numbness on
the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he
attributes it to the diet.

“I’m certainly intellectually at my best,” he said. “I’m stronger, I can swim

better, and my gum disease is gone. It’s like, what the hell?”

“Do you take any vitamins?” asked Rogan.

“No. No, I eat beef and salt and water. at’s it. And I never cheat. Ever. Not
even a little bit.”

“No soda, no wine?”

“I drink club soda.”

“Well, that’s still water.”

“Well, when you’re down to that level, no, it’s not, Joe. ere’s club soda,
which is really bubbly. ere’s Perrier, which is sort of bubbly. ere’s at
water, and there’s hot water. ose distinctions start to become important.”

Peterson reiterated several times that he is not giving dietary advice, but said
that many attendees of his recent speaking tour have come up to him and said
the diet is working for them. e takeaway for listeners is that it worked for
Peterson, and so it may work for them. Rogan also clari ed that though he is
also not an expert, he is fascinated by the fact that he hasn’t heard any negative
stories about people who have started the all-meat diet.

“Well, I have a negative story,” said Peterson. “Both Mikhaila and I noticed
that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren’t supposed
to, the reaction was absolutely catastrophic.” He gives the example of having
had some apple cider and subsequently being incapacitated for a month by
what he believes was an in ammatory response.

“You were done for a month?”

“Oh yeah, it took me out for a month. It was awful ...”

“Apple cider? What was it doing to you?”

“It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I seriously mean

overwhelming. ere’s no way I could’ve lived like that. But see, Mikhaila
knew by then that it would probably only last a month.”

“A month? From fucking cider?”

“I didn’t sleep that month for 25 days. I didn’t sleep at all for 25 days.”

“What? How is that possible?”

“I’ll tell you how it’s possible: You lay in bed frozen in something
approximating terror for eight hours. And then you get up.”

e longest recorded stretch of sleeplessness in a human is 11 days, witnessed

by a Stanford research team.

W
   debate in the scienti c community over just how
much meat belongs in a human diet, it is impossible for all or even
most humans to eat primarily meat. Beef production at the scale
required to feed billions of humans even at current levels of consumption is
environmentally unsustainable. It is not even healthy from a theoretical
evolutionary viewpoint, the microbiome expert Gilbert explained to me.
Carnivores need to eat meat or else they die; humans do not. “e carnivore
gastrointestinal tract is completely different from the human gastrointestinal
tract, which is made up of a system designed to consume large quantities of
complex bers.”

What the Petersons are selling is rather a sense of order and control. Science is
about questions, and self-help is about answers. A recurring idea in Jordan
Peterson’s book is that humans need rules—its subtitle is “an antidote to
chaos”—even if only for the sake of rules. Peterson discovered this through his
own suffering, as when he was searching the world for the best surgeon to give
his young daughter a new hip. In explaining how he dealt with Mikhaila’s
illness, he writes that “existence and limitation are inextricably linked.” He
quotes Laozi:

It is not the clay the potter throws,

Which gives the pot its usefulness,

But the space within the shape,

From which the pot is made

Dietary rules offer limits, good or bad, that help people de ne the self. is is
an attractive prospect, and anyone willing to decree such rules—dietary or
otherwise—is bound to attract attention. Fox News recently declared Peterson
“the left’s public enemy number one” in a segment where he discussed with
Tucker Carlson “why the left wants to silence conservative thought.” ough
to have lived through the last year is to have lived in a world where Peterson
and his ideas have enjoyed near-constant ampli cation.

e allure of a strict code for eating—a way to divide the world into good
foods and bad foods, angels and demons—may be especially strong at a time
when order feels in short supply. Indeed there is at least some bene t to be
had from any and all dietary advice, or rules for life, so long as a person
believes in them, and so long as they provide a code that allows a person to
feel good for having stuck with it and a cohort of like-minded adherents. e
challenge is to nd a code that accords as best as possible with scienti c
evidence about what is good and bad, and with what is best for the world.

* is article previously misidenti ed Peterson as the author of a guest post on her blog.

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