EAT A VEGETABLE! Keto Study Retracted

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Hey, remember Jordan Peterson? He was that Canadian psychologist who hates woke stuff and dirty rooms and helped popularize the carnivore diet. Uh he along with his daughter Michaela announced that they were thriving on eating a diet of only meat, salt, and water with no fruits or grains or vegetables necessary. I discussed this back in 2019 when Michaela revealed that this diet cured her of fatigue, irritability, arthritis, itchiness, digestive distress, general pain, a cediff infection, and Lyme disease. And here's a good overview from just last year of how this plant-free ketogenic diet helped her father. Jordan Peterson says he lost weight, slept better, had no more anxiety or gum disease, and more strength. Wow. And that was a year ago.

[00:00:50]I bet he's feeling even more incredible a year later. Let's take a look.

[00:00:55]>> Hey guys, this is a video update on dad's health as well as a much longer portion of information about what he's suffering from. Let me be super clear.

[00:01:04]Dad has not been on a psych medication since January 2020. This recent flare up of neurological symptoms wasn't due to new medications. That's partly why we had no idea what was going on for about 6 months. We went to specialists obviously and it was misdiagnosed repeatedly which is super common. Um then he got pneumonia and sepsis and obviously that's a whole thing to recover from too and dangerous. You know this year's just been terrible. This recent flare up that started last August was likely due to the stress of both of his parents, my grandparents dying last year. moving countries, selling his home, and mold exposures, which was enough to trigger a recurrence of neurological symptoms.

[00:01:53]Every day for the last year has been hell. We've been through so many health problems. You almost adapt now. You don't cuz it's too awful. But like, oh wow, that that seems bad. But don't worry. Uh it wasn't because of his famous meat and salt and water diet.

[00:02:10]Things would probably be even worse if he had eaten a vegetable in the past year. No, it's a psychmed induced neurological injury from 6 years ago.

[00:02:20]Hey, I wonder if that has anything to do with that time 6 years ago Jordan Peterson announced that he was addicted to benzo 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 benzo anymore. Is that when he got the neurological injury? If so, I mean, I'm just glad Michaela is spreading the word that that's probably a thing you shouldn't do. Uh, and I'm glad Peterson's past year of mold, stress, pneumonia, sepsis, and neurological damage had nothing to do with his allmeat diet. I mean, Michaela is on that diet, too, and she seems fine.

[00:02:56]Super uh high high energy there. 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 MMA sphere. It's been 7 years since I went over the science of the Peterson diet. So, I thought that 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 any of this is any good for you. The quick answer is no. They have not changed their minds. An allmeat 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 exactly you're eating and for how long. The long answer, while longer, is quite entertaining because it involves a hu 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 just a few months ago. Come on, admit it. You You want to hear the long story? It's It's juicy like like a steak covered in salt and water.

[00:04:19]>> What are sloppy steaks?

[00:04:21]>> It's a steak with water dumped on it.

[00:04:23]It's really, really good.

[00:04:25]>> It all started with an online beef, as most things do, uh, as detailed in this Wired article from last June. Dave Feldman, a software engineer who is really into keto, but has no scientific or medical training, suspected that doctors were wrong, that having a very high LDL cholesterol level was de facto dangerous because it leads to a buildup of plaque in your arteries. He suspected this based on the fact that a lot of people on keto diets tend to have high LDL cholesterol and he likes the keto diet. So yeah, what if all the medical research on this topic to date is wrong and he's going to be okay? Enter Spencer Nadolski, 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. Now, obviously, the argument was already pretty much settled, but they wanted to focus on people that hadn't really been studied that much. People that Feldman called lean mass hyperresponders or LMHRs, which is still a lot to say, so I'm going to call them lemurs, who appear to be fit and healthy by pretty much every metric except for their high LDL. They wanted to monitor these people for a year and see whether or not plaque starts building up in their arteries.

[00:05:50]Nadski accepted that maybe for that group of people specifically, sure, maybe 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 turns out it's unethical to make a group of people with dangerously high cholesterol wander around like that for a year without giving them medication to lower it. Feldman and Nidolski found a workaround though uh which was by recruiting a very specific type of lemur who I will call absolute morons. These are the lean mass hyperresponders who know they have high cholesterol know that 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 sometimes decades to build up in the arteries. But whatever they pushed on while they were still trying to recruit completely moronic lemurs. Feldman presented some of their preliminary data at a low carb conference. I cannot even fathom the lack of energy in that room when 3 p.m.

[00:07:04]rolls around. Anyway, he used the data to suggest that the lemurs were healthy because they hardly had any plaque at this start of the study. Nidowski finally had enough of his obvious bias.

[00:07:19]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 were allowed to press on. One of those other authors was a guy named James Earles who at the time was chief medical officer for a company called Clearly where he also held equity according to this article from Retraction Watch. Feldman says he didn't know Earles was involved with Clearly.

[00:07:44]So I guess it's just a giant coincidence that Clearly is the company that performed the scanning of all of the subjects. Oh, also the other non-clearly employed authors say they did not have access to any of the data prior to publication in order to make sure that they were blinded to it. But they also say that clearly staff were not double blinded. And what about the data itself?

[00:08:09]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 as it relates to LDL cholesterol. But in the final paper, they only include a figure about that with no numbers and instead they focused on a finding that they saw no association between plaque and a particular protein that carries fat molecules around the body. When they were called out on that, the authors had to admit that their study actually did find that the average subject's arterial plaque increased within the year by 42.8%.

[00:08:45]Their own data disproved their hypothesis, showing that these healthy patients were piling plaque into their arteries at a higher rate than people with diabetes, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome, which you know uh is bad. Despite these problems, the paper made it past peer review and into a fairly wellrespected 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 the publication. As Wired pointed out, it was in the top 5% of more than 24 million papers tracked by Altmetric shortly after publishing.

[00:09:29]Obviously, the podcast bros like Joe Rogan ate this [ __ ] up and spread it to their huge audiences. And so, I doubt we'll see any of these people cover the retraction. And the worst part, Feldman saw all this criticism, but still decided to make an entire [ __ ] documentary about how he's overturning decades of scientific research on cholesterol. You can go watch it on Amazon if you hate your life that much.

[00:09:54]So, thanks to this guy, there are definitely people walking around today thinking that they don't actually need to listen to their doctor and fix their extremely high LDL cholesterol because, well, you know, that doctor's probably relying on old outdated wisdom. And when the massive heart attack hits, everyone will be shocked because this person cared so much about their health. It's a tragedy. Anyway, I wonder how Jordan Peterson's doing.

[00:10:26]Hey everybody, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like. If you loved the video, please subscribe. And if you think the world could use more videos like this and you happen to have a few bucks laying around, head to patreon.com/rebecca and join an awesome community of nerds like the people whose names you see on the screen right now. Thanks.