If you follow my stuff you might remember multiple articles I have provided about weight loss and how my particular methods actually have worked for me. This included eating a bunch of meat, almost entirely avoiding carbohydrates and basically protein loading. I have, to date, lost more than 50 lbs doing just this strategy.
What the Health is a nutritional documentary film produced by Joaquin Phoenix that attempts to point out the benefits of a plant-based diet - which is the opposite of what I have been doing. They use interesting graphics, have a load of MD's and nutritionists who come on and explain what these benefits actually mean. I have to say, it was very convincing, to the point where I started immediately investigating plant-based methods of obtaining the protein that I need.
The doco goes after the usual suspects such as fast food and how that is bad for us, then extends into meat and dairy.... just in a general sense. They attempt to explain that eating meat and dairy is more dangerous towards health than smoking and then try to make the case about how eating a vegan diet is actually not expensive (I know for a fact that it is.)
Now. at the end of all this I started to wonder if perhaps I have been mislead by the various lobbying groups that no doubt, are permitted to influence public opinion such as the fact that meat, dairy, and eggs all have giant conglomerates whose sole purpose is to influence lawmakers and public opinion. Remember the "Got Milk" campaign? That was one of them.
The documentary was very convincing, but I have to admit, I think they went too far. Towards the end they were attempting to suggest that not only can a plant-based diet help prevent a wide-variety of diseases (and I think it is relatively understood that this is the case) but they also tried to make the claim that adapting a plant-based diet can actually CURE things like cancer, heart disease, and asthma - in one extreme they try to say that this can happen in as little as 2 weeks. This is an absurd claim and I think if they had just been a bit more honest, I would be more likely to get on board.
Other than the vegans that want to protect animals I have never really understood the militant vegetable people out there. I don't understand their objective. Phoneix and director Kip Andersen seem to really want people to eat vegetables...
I think their case would have been a lot more effective if they had simply kept it reasonable but instead they went too far... suggesting that eating fruit is going to CURE cancer? GTFOH!
It was entertaining, but in the end the outlandish claims they make turn it quickly into what I believe it is: A propaganda film filled with cherry-picking of data, distorting findings of studies, and definitely using biased sources. You know, the exact tactics they are accusing the meat and dairy industry of using in the film.
It is informative, but getting bad information is probably no better than getting no information at all and while I am not going to completely write this thing off, I feel that until you look into the counter-argument that this film is trying to make.... that it can be pretty safely called #fakenews.
Before they went into full-propaganda mode they actually did make some good points. Because of that, i am going to re-introduce more plants into my diet... but sorry guys, meat is likely here to stay with this guy.
