TEDx and the lion diet

• Mikhaila Peterson gave a TEDx talk about how the lion diet, an all-meat diet, put her autoimmune disorder into remission after crippling arthritis and two joint replacements.
• Mikhaila Peterson followed TEDx rules carefully because her diet story is anecdotal, and she ended by asking the medical system to study it further.
• TEDx would not post Mikhaila Peterson's talk after four months of back-and-forth, while other vegan disease-cure talks stayed available under guidelines they did not apply to her case.
• Harvard later published a carnivore-diet study about others who had disease remission, so this diet deserves serious medical attention.

Early arthritis and immune suppression

• At age two, Mikhaila Peterson began walking with her feet turned out, and by grade two she had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis active in 37 joints.
• She used methotrexate and naproxen, had cortisone injected into 17 joints, could not sit cross-legged, and used a fat pencil because she could not close her hand.
• In grade four, Enbrel and methotrexate injections put her into a medically induced remission, and she went from nearly wheelchair-bound to playing sports.
• At the same time, her mental health collapsed into OCD symptoms, suicidal thoughts, major depressive disorder, and possible bipolar type 2 with hypomania.

Fatigue, pain, and more medication

• By grade eight, she had biting sensations over her body and chronic fatigue so severe that she could not wake up and fell asleep in class.
• By grade eleven, arthritis destroyed the cartilage in her right hip, pain stopped her from sleeping, and she used OxyContin before a hip replacement at 17.
• While she healed from the hip replacement, her body destroyed the cartilage in her left ankle, and she later had that ankle replaced.
• At university, Wellbutrin led to a grand mal seizure, an SNRI made her intensely angry, fatigue made her miss final exams, and she dropped out.

Rash and the search for diet triggers

• After returning home, a rash spread from her back and bum to her face, and dermatologists gave no useful answer.
• She was using Tylenol 3 for shoulder pain, 40 mg of Adderall to wake up, dapsone for skin healing, 40 mg of escitalopram for depression, an inhaler for infections, and a prescription antihistamine for severe allergies.
• She found dermatitis herpetiformis, the skin manifestation of celiac disease, and cut gluten because celiac disease can be triggered by gluten.
• She stopped immune suppressants, monitored symptoms closely, and kept searching because gluten removal was not enough.

Meat, greens, and the first remission

• In September 2015, she reduced her diet to meat, greens, and some root vegetables while removing foods she thought could cause inflammation.
• That month her skin healed for the first time in years, and she lost three pant sizes of bloating she had not known was there.
• Two months in, her fatigue disappeared for the first time since grade eight, and she stopped taking Adderall.
• Three months in, her depression disappeared for the first time in her life, and she stopped escitalopram over two weeks without knowing SSRI withdrawal existed.

Food reactions and withdrawal

• After reintroducing soy, she had a severe autoimmune response: digestive upset, full-body itching, depression worse than ever, mouth ulcers, arthritis, and rash.
• Around the same time, SSRI withdrawal mixed with autoimmune symptoms and food sensitivities, and each food reintroduction caused reactions that lasted 24 days.
• She eventually stopped reintroducing foods, became pregnant, and later returned to meat and greens to control symptoms.
• While breastfeeding, her wrist buckled, arthritis returned, she was itchy everywhere, and the earlier diet no longer worked.

Beef, lamb, salt, and water

• She cut out everything except beef, and after two weeks the itching went away and her joints began to feel better.
• Six weeks into the all-beef diet, her depression lifted and she stopped crying in the morning.
• Five months later, her anxiety lifted, and she felt back in heaven compared with how she had been living.
• The diet became beef, lamb, salt, and water, which she calls the lion diet.

Family results and medical attention

• Her mother used the diet and her osteoarthritis went away; her father used it and lost 70 pounds, and his GERD and psoriasis went away.
• She has heard from thousands of people with autoimmune disorders who tried similar diets and saw similar results.
• She now runs a company, hosts a podcast, raises her child, and shares her experience so people can see what the diet does for her.
• Sick people feel isolated and miserable, and what would be really cool is the medical community taking this seriously and doing case studies.

References

• [00:16] TEDx Content Guidelines — https://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/tedxcontentguidelines.pdf
• [00:42] Behavioral Characteristics and Self-Reported Health Status among 2029 Adults Consuming a "Carnivore Diet" — https://doi.org/10.1093/cdn/nzab133