What's Wrong With Jordan Peterson's Health?
Jordan Peterson’s health has been suffering tremendously.
Mikhaila, his daughter, saw that what was ailing him was affecting so many systems of his body that it had to all be connected and began to wonder if it was a form of mitochondrial dysfunction.
In trying to research whether mitochondrial dysfunction could be driven by the turning points in his health problems like SSRI withdrawal, benzodiazepine withdrawal, and toxic mold, she found my work and reached out to me.
This is the conversation that we had:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFhBq2Qlbto
My hypothesis is as follows.
Mikhaila shares half of Jordan’s genes and has been more detailed about her own health journey going back to childhood, so we start with her.
She had juvenile arthritis symptoms starting at 2 and a diagnosis at 7. She went on Enbrel, a “biologic” (a pseudoscientific regulatory term) that opposes the action of the inflammatory mediator tumor necrosis alpha (TNF-alpha); and on methotrexate, which inhibits folate and adenosine metabolism. Methotrexate raises adenosine, which inhibits T cell proliferation. Its inhibition of folate metabolism is thought to be more relevant to cancer but its adenosine-mediated inhibition of T cell proliferation is thought to be more relevant to autoimmune arthritis.
The next year, at age 8, she was diagnosed with depression and put on SSRIs.
My hypothesis is that she has an underlying block in mitochondrial metabolism leading to CoA sequestration, which occurs when CoA-requiring pathways fail to complete properly. This leads to secretion of TNF-alpha as part of a cellular stress response. TNF-alpha serves to increase carnitine transport into the cell. The carnitine then trades places with CoA, detoxifying the metabolic intermediates and carrying them out into the urine, allowing CoA metabolism to continue.
Blocking the TNF-alpha is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the elevated TNF-alpha will interact with genetic predispositions to certain types of immune dysfunction and with suboptimal joint mechanics to produce an autoimmune disease. Blocking the TNF offers relief from the autoimmunity, but then in doing so makes the cells that were releasing it as a stress signal unable to mitigate their CoA sequestration. This may lead to a plethora of side effects, and for Mikhaila this was depression.
I do not discount that inhibition of folate metabolism by methotrexate could have messed with her methylation system, but Mikhaila remains very intolerant of methylfolate and thrives on a low-folate all-meat diet, and I do not think any of her health problems are explained merely by a methylation deficit.
Her first major advance was going on an elimination diet that eventually morphed into the red meat carnivore “Lion Diet.”
T cells are fueled by glucose and glutamine during active inflammation, and when they transition to resolving inflammation a major drop in glucose and glutamine is a central hallmark of the metabolic shift.
The zero-carb nature of the Lion Diet helps resolve T cell inflammation and displaces the need for methotrexate.
The large amount of red meat provides carnitine, which addresses CoA sequestration from the point of carnitine supply, relieving the need of cells to secrete TNF-alpha to signal carnitine demand. The carnitine in the red meat thereby helps relieve the need for the Enbrel.
Since her elimination diet gave her the first relief of depression she had experienced, it led her to go off the SSRIs.
Going off SSRIs produced 2.5 years of new-onset neurological dysfunction, which I contend was new-onset mitochondrial dysfunction. This may have interacted or blended with the mitochondrial dysfunction that initially led to the arthritis, or it may have just been a completely new acquired mitochondrial disorder thrown on top of the existing problems.
YouTube
PhD Nutritionist: Every Chronic Illness Traces Back to This One Thing | Dr. Chris Masterjohn EP 231
Here’s a podcast I was really interested in, about mitochondrial dysfunction. From all my years of using ketogenic diets like the lion diet for health, getting impacted by mold, experiencing SSRI induced withdrawal/damage, it finally appears like the root…
May 1, 2026 524 2
