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Transcript:
Hey, remember Jordan Peterson? He’s the famous Canadian psychologist who hates “woke” stuff, and who helped popularize the carnivore diet. He and his daughter, Mikhaila, announced that they were thriving on a diet of only meat, salt, and water, with no fruits or vegetables or grains necessary. I discussed this back in 2019 when Mikhaila revealed that this diet cured her of fatigue, irritability, arthritis, itchiness, digestive distress, and general pain, plus a C diff infection. And here’s a good overview from just last year of how this “plant free ketogenic diet” helped her father: Peterson says he lost weight, slept better, had no more anxiety or gum disease, and more strength. Wow! I bet he’s feeling incredible a year later. Let’s take a look!
Oh wow, that seems bad. But don’t worry, it wasn’t because of his famous meat and salt diet. Things would probably be even worse if he had been eating vegetables. No, it’s “a psych med induced neurological injury” from six years ago. I wonder if that has anything to do with that time six years ago when Jordan Peterson announced that he was addicted to benzos but didn’t feel like doing regular rehab so he flew to Russia to be put into a coma until he wasn’t addicted to benzos anymore? Is that when he got the neurological injury? Well I’m glad Mikhaila is spreading the word that that’s probably a bad thing to do.
And I’m glad Peterson’s past year of mold, stress, pneumonia, sepsis, and neurological damage had nothing to do with his meat diet. I mean, Mikhaila is on that diet, too, and she seems fine. Super, um, high energy and positive.
Both the “plant free keto diet” and the regular keto diet (which does allow you to stave off scurvy with the occasional bit of fruit) are extremely popular, especially amongst the bro podcaster sphere. It’s been seven years since I went over the science of the Peterson Diet, so I thought today might be a good time to talk about research that’s been published since and whether or not the experts have changed their minds on whether it’s any good for you.
The quick answer is no. They have not changed their minds. An all-meat diet is still very bad for you, and a more flexible keto diet needs to be carefully implemented with medical oversight because it can be bad for you in certain ways, depending upon your unique situation and what you’re eating and for how long, exactly.
The long answer, while longer, is quite entertaining, because it involves a huxter publishing a study in a peer reviewed journal despite the fact that the study was essentially just a sack of red flags, and it was finally retracted a few months ago.
Come on, admit it. You want to hear the longer answer. It’s juicy, like a steak covered in salt and water.
It all started in an online beef, as detailed in this Wired article from last June. Dave Feldman, a software engineer who is really into keto, suspected that doctors were wrong that having very high LDL cholesterol was de facto dangerous because it leads to a buildup of plaque in your arteries. He suspected this, because a lot of people on keto diets tend to have high LDL cholesterol, and he likes keto, and so. Yeah. What if all the medical research on this topic to date is wrong and everything will be okay?
Enter Spencer Nadolsky, an actual doctor who specializes in obesity medicine and lipidology, who told Feldman he was wrong. The two eventually decided to team up and produce a study to settle the argument.
They decided to focus on people that Feldman called “Lean Mass Hyper-Responders,” and which I will call “lemurs,” who appear to be fit and healthy by pretty much every metric except their high LDL. They could monitor them for a year and see whether or not plaque starts building up in their arteries. Nadolsky accepted that maybe for that group of people specifically, sure, maybe very high LDL isn’t actually that big of a problem.
They ran into trouble early on, because an ethics board wouldn’t approve this study because it is unethical to make a group of people with dangerously high cholesterol wander around like that for a year without taking medication to lower it. Feldman and Nadolsky found a work-around, though, which was by recruiting a very specific set of “lemurs,” who I will call “absolute morons.” These are the “Lean Mass Hyper-Responders” who know they have high cholesterol, know they can control it with medication, but refuse to do so. Great. Ethics approval granted.
I’ll note here that already, experts didn’t think this was a great study design, because plaque takes many years, and decades even, to build up in the arteries. But whatever, they pushed on.
While still in the recruiting phase, Feldman presented some of their preliminary data at a low-carb conference (I cannot even fathom the lack of energy in that room when 3pm rolls around). He used the data to suggest that the lemurs were healthy because they hardly had any plaque at the start of the study; Nadolsky finally had enough of the obvious bias, so he filed a complaint with the review board and quit the study.
The board didn’t care, and so Feldman and his other authors pressed on. One of those other authors was a guy named James Earls, who at the time was Chief Medical Officer for a company called Cleerly, where he also held equity, according to Retraction Watch. Feldman claims he did not know this, so I guess it’s just a giant coincidence that Cleerly is the company that performed the scanning of the subjects. Oh, also, the other non-Cleerly-employed authors say they did not have access to the data prior to publication to make sure that they were blinded to it, but they also say they didn’t realize that Cleerly staff were NOT double blinded.
And what about the data itself? Well, critics pointed out that the original purpose of the study was to compare the progression of plaque in the arteries over the course of that year, but in the final paper, they only include a figure with no numbers, and instead focused on a finding that they saw no association between plaque and a particular protein that carries fat molecules around the body. When called on that, the authors had to admit that their study actually found that the average subject’s arterial plaque increased with the year by 42.8%! Their OWN DATA disproved their hypothesis, showing that these “healthy” patients were piling plaque into their veins at a higher rate than people with diabetes, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome. Which is bad.
Despite all of this, the paper made it past peer review and into a well-respected journal, JACC: Advances, in April of last year. It took almost an entire year of valid complaints before they finally retracted it, but unfortunately, news of a retraction rarely competes with the initial news of publication. As Wired points out, it was in the top 5% of more than 24 million papers tracked by Altmetric shortly after publishing. Obviously the podcast bros like Joe Rogan ate this shit up and spread it to their huge audiences, and I doubt we’ll see any of them cover the retraction.
And the worst part? Feldman saw all the criticism but still decided to make an entire fucking documentary about how he’s overturning decades of science on cholesterol. You can watch it on Amazon, if you hate your life that much.
So thanks to this guy, there are definitely people walking around thinking that they don’t actually have to listen to their doctor and fix their extremely high LDL cholesterol because the doctor is probably relying on old, outdated wisdom. And when the massive heart attack hits, everyone will be shocked because they cared so much about their health.
