He went on an elimination diet because his family has some nasty immune problems. It’s mundane, I don’t get the controversy.

It's controversial because it sounds pseudo-scientific. Why would removing all vegetables from his diet help with an autoimmune disorder? His daughter's blog called "Don’t Eat That" had the tagline "The food pyramid is a lie, fat is good for you, and many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone." (though, it does now say "Do not take this as medical advice. I am not a doctor. This is my story and this is what worked for me.")

https://web.archive.org/web/20180320101920/http://mikhailape...

His other health choices don't really help his case. He went to Russia to get weened off of an addiction because "North American hospitals had misdiagnosed him". The Russian doctors are "not influenced by pharmaceutical companies to treat the side-effects of one drug with more drugs," and they “have the guts to medically detox someone from benzodiazepines.”"

People used to believe that eating fat makes you fat, and eating sugar makes you sweet (okay, the latter is maybe an exaggeration), because it seemed so obvious. Later they realized that actually eating lots of sugar makes you fat. That's progress. The sugar producers want you to believe the old version; they love to emphasise how "low-fat" their heaps of sugar are. (Every time you read "low-fat", translate it mentally to "contains lots of sugar". Every time you read "low-sugar", translate it mentally to "contains lots of artificial sweeteners". Hint: the actually healthy stuff, such as fruit and vegetables, doesn't need to protest too much.) Education about this part is a good thing.

On the other hand, removing vegetables from diet goes completely against the currect best knowledge. You should eat a lot of vegetables, preferably raw. Like, okay, you can cook your broccoli; but then eat some other raw vegetable, and some fruit (uncooked, without extra sugar). -- However, I have never heard Peterson recommend removing vegetables as a general advice for others; it was always in context of finding out what works for his autoimmune disorder, because the standard medicine didn't help him much, so he experimented with crazy things.

So, these are two different things. One is highly controversial, the other not at all.

I have my own problems with his daughter’s profiting off his back. I don’t see what you posted there as more click bait than anything else.

Many research bodies and authorities on health have flipped the food pyramid around. The CSRIO supports a low carb diet over the traditional carb heavy food pyramid. She’s just repeating what the experts have said. That part is the opposite of pseudoscience, and it’s lazy parroting.

Jordan has reactions to foods we don’t normally have a problem with, as does his daughter. They share methods that work for them and hold up the idea of eliminating everything and then working foods back in as they prove to be okay for them.

There’s been countless documentaries about the effect of big pharmaceutical money on the likelihood of certain drugs being prescribed by doctors and the money the docs make. It’s standard fare in America, no judgement about that from me.

Apart from a few eccentric behaviours and saying dumb things occasionally like his comments on godel, Jordan states the obvious in an inflammatory way and people are surprised when he’s actually rational under the flames. Zzz.

His daughter:

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

The 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.“

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

> Meat cures all?

When did he say that?

I’m making a point, not quoting the man.

Come on, all you have to do is google "jordan peterson meat" and you get pages and pages of when-he-said-thats.

I've listened to probably hundreds of hours of JP and he never said that. He only said that, in his particular case, a lot of the terrible ailments he had went away after he switched to a meat-only diet. He doesn't say that meat is a cure for anything - his main theory is that he just has a ton of strong food alergies and, by eating only one thing he's not allergic to, he avoids them.