in the last couple of years i took care of many snails, either because i was curious to have them as pets or because for whatever reason i found them unable to survive on their own, so i helped them get back on their “feet” (foot?) before freeing them. but, this means i can’t keep them forever, and i spent my summer without snail pets, except for the one i accidentally picked up at the beach and that i couldn’t keep for too long… but i never stopped loving them! and when i had to remove this little baby from the garden i couldn’t resist… welcome back to the snail army :^)
“I know how 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 first 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 described an adolescence that involved multiple debilitating medical diagnoses, beginning with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Some unknown process had triggered her body’s immune system to attack her joints. The joint problems culminated in hip and ankle replacements in her teens, coupled with “extreme fatigue, depression and anxiety, brain fog, and sleep problems.” In fifth grade she was diagnosed with depression, and then later something called idiopathic hypersomnia (which translates to English as “sleeping too much, of unclear cause”—which translates further to sorry we really don’t know what’s going on).
Everything the doctors tried failed, and she did 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, figured 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 artificial sweeteners or non-artificial 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.”
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 finds its way into her mouth, she will be ill, she says. This 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. Then she had a reaction that lasted three weeks and included joint pain, acne, and anxiety.
The popularity of Peterson’s narrative is explained by more than its timeless tropes; it has also been amplified 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. The elder Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, could at first 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 Third 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.”
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 reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters 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?”
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. The takeaway for listeners is that it worked for Peterson, and so it may work for them. Rogan also clarified 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 inflammatory 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. There’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.”
The longest recorded stretch of sleeplessness in a human is 11 days, witnessed by a Stanford research team.
