I don't want to derail the discussion with irrelevant material, but to suggest that eating a beef-only diet cures autoimmune disorders is utterly unsupported by medical science, for one.
As someone who's mother died of a rare/poorly understood cancer after fighting it for 10 years and multiple experimental treatments, and met others in similar boats along the way (support groups), there are tons of niche medical conditions that science hasn't even bothered/had the resources to investigate.
Is a beef-only diet a good idea for the general population? Probably not. Could it be ideal for people with extremely rare auto-immune conditions that have an allergic reaction to virtually everything else? Sure, and that existing doesn't sound crazy to me at all.
I've noticed a trend where scientifically minded people tend to get hung up the "proven" at the expense of the "plausible", forgetting that everything they rightfully treat as proven once could have been dismissed in a similar manner. Real people in the real world have to make decisions based on nothing more than plausibility all the time, and I don't see why diet should be any different. Particularity if none of the "proven" solutions are working for you.
Put another way, there's a difference between "the evidence says this is wrong" and "there is no evidence that this is true".
I think you’re right. But people have all sorts of crazy diets for unsupported reasons.
I don’t think Peterson is promoting the carnivore diet, but I did hear him explain his diet on a podcast and it seemed pretty couched in curiosity, not resolution. The thing I remember is lots of “I don’t knows” and attribution of any benefits to it being an elimination diet vs any special property of beef.
Many autoimmune disorders react to food, for example the infamous Celiac disease is an autoimmune reaction to gluten, that is present in many cereals (not only wheat).
So why beef only wouldn't work?
I have autoimmune diseases myself and have a very meat heavy diet, to me is what works, as soon I move to a more typical diet my health declines quickly.
Well he has a PHD in clinical psychology, not nutrition. I think people like the OP throw these jabs at him purely because they're angry he spoke out against the Canadian pronoun law, rather than any complaints about the validity of his research itself.
Or, alternate option, you can take it at face value in that he claimed a meat only diet helped him, using his public persona to push an agenda that is completely unsupported by science.
He wasn't "pushing an agenda". He was telling people about how a diet he went on helped him and his daughter. He explicitly stated multiple times that he wasn't a doctor and that his experience was anecdotal.
Peterson does have a way of trying to tie all of his beliefs into a larger world view, and selling that, though. It's the same thing with the Mesopotamian gods and his beliefs about gender.
That's true, however I do think the meat-only anecdote came from a good place. Him and his daughter had been suffering from clinical depression and a host of other problems for decades and the diet seemed to help them. I think if I was in a similar situation I'd try to let other people know too.
Take care of both your mental and physical health.
Do something important with your life that's meaningful to you.
Respect yourself.
Life is bloody hard and you should be easy on yourself when you screw up. As long as you learn something from your mistakes and attempt to push forward again with new found knowledge, you're on the right path.
Clean up your room.
All of that is the utter nonsense Peterson spews out all of the time. None of that is useful or true. What a monster.
You can sarcastically toss out a list of uncontroversial useful or true things that have been said by literally anyone, no matter how often they’ve otherwise been wrong or harmful. It’s not a refutation.
Then by that, everyone's thoughts on anything and everything should be thrown out. Everyone is an asshole if you dig deep enough. There is no such thing as a perfect person.
