How meat turned Jordan Peterson into a vegetable

By Marc Westley, M.Phil

Professor Jordan Peterson has been described by The Guardian as ‘the closest academia has to a rock star’ and in true rocknroll style, his meteoric rise to fame and notoriety is now counterbalanced by a breakdown free-fall that bears many of the archetypal hallmarks of rocknroll burn out: a punishing tour routine, drug abuse and addiction, bizarre diva-like eating disorders overlapping into self-harm and near death rehab meltdowns. While in rehab, late 2019 — in Moscow of all places — Peterson, after multiple seizures threatened his life, was placed for 9 days in an intubated coma. His daughter Mikhaila reported that post-coma he could neither speak nor write for a significant period of time. The once garrulous guru of taking responsibility for your own destiny had conspired to forge for himself a karmic path to vegetative muteness.

On July 1, Peterson emerged from his 10 month long muteness. Speaking on his daughter Mikhaila’s Lion Diet podcast, Peterson detailed his ‘worse than death’ experiences over the last year. Father and daughter both pointed the finger of blame firmly at one cause for the devastating collapse of Peterson’s health: his addiction to Benzodiazepine. Now I’m not saying the benzos and Peterson’s calamitous withdrawal from the benzos didn’t play their role in screwing the professor, but I’d like to briefly explore another mitigating factor in Peterson’s miseries that he and his daughter failed to mention in the hour long podcast: their bizarre, shared carnivore diet.

Professor Peterson tells us back in his 2018 Joe Rogan podcast interview that he made the decision to adopt a carnivore diet because of the perceived positive impacts gained from the diet by his daughter Mikhaila. Mikhaila has been battling health issues most of her life. By the age of 7 she was diagnosed as suffering from chronic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and placed on a range of medication including methotrexate, a powerful drug usually associated with cancer treatment but increasingly turned to by doctors for use in ‘treating’ chronic arthritis. Mikhaila underwent an ankle and hip replacement at the tender age of 16 which is not much of an endorsement for methotrexate’s record in treating arthritis. Can you imagine a more severe manifestation of juvenile arthritis than having an ankle and hip amputated?

By 2016 Mikhaila’s health was at breaking point. Wrestling against the repetitive hell of mega-medicated perpetual…