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Watch us wreck the Mikh
Once again another intelligent conservative has been railroaded by our liberal justice system, just like Col. Oliver North, Officer Stacy Koon, and cartoon smokes-person Joe Camel. We have touched on Mikhaila Peterson before and were hoping to never touch on her again but on that we are as shit out of luck as Kanye West’s publicist when she books a week off during what she assumes will be “a pretty quiet time”. Because you know that this dingbat seeks publicity as officiously as eye poking hit-and-run king Jon Jones seeks suicide by cop – purposefully, relentlessly and with no thought at all to innocent bystanders.
She has recently been pissing in the collective ear of her followers about the decision by TEDx to not publish her talk at the Acton Academy Placer, Roseville California on Saturday, 7 August 2021. The talk was on her experiences with The Lion Diet, her psychotic meat-only regime she flogs to mentally ill incels on her shitty website. Mikh was pissed. She didn’t put her father in a coma for this. TEDx guidelines say they may choose not to publish videos “in extreme cases”. So what’s good?
Video nasty
Pretty much nothing if we’re honest. Mikh thoughtfully posts the video of her talk in full. For long-time viewers, it’s a familiar story. The genuinely harrowing tale of childhood and adolescent illness segue into her epiphany that meat, salt and water could cure all her maladies.
“I went from living in hell to living in heaven,” she says.
Heaven and hell? Interesting language but entirely appropriate when selling a miracle cure. Mikh has in fact found God recently and seems pretty happy about it though He could not be contacted for comment. Her account of her epiphany is instructive. Troubled by 4 (FOUR) major life problems she took the advice of a Christian man to pray to the Almighty that he might reveal himself to her.
“I went home that night and I felt pretty upset about these four major problems,” she said. “I was praying, like seriously praying…The next day, all four problems cleared up…I also woke up with this sense of calm.”
Another miracle cure! It’s the transactional worship model of belief favoured by many sports stars. Give God the glory and he will give you the victory. Pray and your major life problems will disappear within 24-hours.
It’s a rich man’s churl
The problem with critiquing someone who offers testimony of a traumatic childhood and/or revelation from the crucified Christ is you the risk of being labelled a churl. That is a risk The Savage is happy to take. Because when you target the vulnerable for financial gain, the gloves come off and your health journey and conversations with the prophets become irrelevant. Mikh began offering consultations for Lion Diet hopefuls for $120 an hour. This is someone with no medical or nutritional qualifications promoting a diet where the consensus among people with medical and or nutritional collocations is “get the f*ck away from me”.
A representative sample of expert verdicts: “Physiologically, it would just be an immensely bad idea. A terribly, terribly bad idea.”[efn_note] The Jordan Peterson All-Meat Diet – The Atlantic [/efn_note]
“This is probably the worst diet I’ve ever heard and I’ve heard such bad ones.” [efn_note] My carnivore diet: what I learned from eating only beef, salt and water – The Guardian [/efn_note]
“This sounds disastrous on multiple levels.”[efn_note] They mock vegans and eat 4lb of steak a day: meet ‘carnivore dieters’ – The Guardian [/efn_note]
You also have to ask exactly how complicated can a diet comprising nothing but ruminant meat, salt and water be? Does it really need $120 an-hour hand-holding sessions? Apparently so. It doesn’t stop there. Her online support group clocked in at $599 a year. That’s pretty steep man, given that the diet is backed by personal anecdotes and photos of her in her bra and pants.
That’s pretty steep man, given that the diet is backed by personal anecdotes and photos of her in her bra and pants.
Daddy’s issue
Actually, that’s not quite true. She also has unbiased testimony from her mammy and pappy bolstering her scheme. Ma Peterson went on the diet and it cured her osteoarthritis which by any standard is pretty impressive. The terminal kidney cancer diagnosis she received after this isn’t similarly trumpeted (although in keeping with family tradition she made a recovery described as “miraculous”).
Pops too went on the diet and found that after the month-long bout of diarrhoea that comes standard with the protocol, several of his alarming illnesses improved. Gastric reflux: gone; gingivitis: a thing of the past; psoriasis: no more. He came off his antidepressants and every aspect of this miracle cure was going fantastic. Here was where he made his fatal error – eating a stew that contained some apple cider. This kicked off the mother of all panic attacks, leaving the doctor unable to sleep for 25 days. “It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom,” he told Joe Rogan. The Lion Diet is so good that people are dying to go on it. One deviation from it and you will wish you were dead. Incidentally, the longest recorded time a human has gone without sleep is 11 days and 25 minutes but in the heads-is-tails world of the Petersons anything is possible. A vulgar man would say that interviews with Pa Peterson increasingly sound like it’s Jay from the Inbetweeners in the hotseat.
Mikh meanwhile claims she’s talked to thousands of people who have done similar things and got similar results. There is no convincing evidence for this of course. But wait what about the study she cites in her talk – the one from Harvard University no less? Let’s talk about that. The study, “Behavioral Characteristics and Self-Reported Health Status among 2029 Adults Consuming a “Carnivore Diet”” is based on a social media survey that asked a bunch of carnivore lifestyler wackjobs* whether they really liked their diet or not. The scientists who carried out the study thank Jarhead loon Shawn Baker and moderator on the World Carnivore Tribe Facebook groups Travis Statham for their input in distributing the survey. Statham is known for eating six McDonald’s quarter pounder patties for lunch. I don’t think you have to be Joey Carbstrong to think that asking a group of cucknivore zealots to self-report their experiences on their identity politics soused diet has limited validity.
Asking a group of cucknivore zealots to self-report their experiences on their identity politics soused diet has limited validity.
There’s mo limits
To their credit, the researchers do acknowledge the multiple limitations of the study. They concede that self-reported data is “prone to recall and reporting bias” and how surveying an online community can lead to “over-reporting of adherence and perceived beneficial effects”. They also highlight the danger of selection bias where “individuals who experienced adverse effects or lack of health benefits are likely to have abandoned the diet and would therefore not have been captured in this survey”. There’s also the widely recognised issue of people adopting the diet in their temporary period of ill-health, then when the spontaneous regression to mean improvement comes, they mistakenly attribute it to the diet. Lastly, the confounding benefits of other lifestyle activities “e.g., physical activity, consumption of relatively whole, unprocessed foods” were not taken into account.
Talk is deep
Mikh complains that TED have uploaded multiple pro-vegan videos without any problem. On this, she is correct – because many such videos exist. On the whole though they are not promoting veganism as a miracle cure for illnesses. There’s Earthling Ed dealing with arguments against veganism, Lauren Ornelas discussing her Food Empowerment Project nonprofit and William Li on cancer-fighting foods. When Pat McAuley gives his anecdotal talk that a plant-based diet changed his life, TED flagged the video as falling outside of their content guidelines. That seems fair enough but could they not have offered Mikh the same courtesy? I dunno, man. Maybe come back when the largest dietetic organisation in the world says of your death banquet “It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” or the meaty equivalent.
Release the hounds
Don’t get a mistaken idea incidentally that The Savage is somehow against the Harvard study. He’s hugely in favour of it. If nausey free speech absolutists are right and sunlight is the best antiseptic then in the words of the Negro spiritual “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine”. Place any iteration of the carnivore diet under the sunlight of replicated peer-reviewed studies and I’m quite confident it will burst into flames like Dracula catapulted onto Miami Beach at spring break. “To our knowledge,” the Harvard scientists say “this is the first modern report on a large group of people habitually consuming few plant foods, a dietary pattern broadly considered incompatible with good health.” So let’s fix that. And if the preponderance of evidence shows that the carnivore diet offers a bonanza of health benefits or even is less atrocious than first thought then we can take that hit, knowing as we do that the ethical and environmental arguments in favour of veganism are bullet-proof.
My suspicion is that the scientific community are pulling a bait-and-switch here. Gulling in the cucknivore massive with a friendly survey to get their delusion on record before a longitudinal cohort study reveals a scurvy-ridden crew of sat fat choked dopes who are f*cking their livers worse than prime Charlie Parker on a bender with John Barrymore. In any event, Mikhaila Peterson can have her TED published around about the time she gets some credibility. Don’t hold your breath.
* Respondents were from World Carnivore Tribe, Facebook, 23%; Instagram, 18%; r/Zerocarnb, Reddit, 7%; Zeroing in on Health, Facebook, 5%; Twitter, 5%; other, 42%.