What the WHAT? A critical look at the new documentary, ‘What the Health.’

*Author’s Note: Despite my critique of the ideas in the documentary, I do not advocate for my clients to either eat meat or not eat meat. That is a personal decision up to each individual.

 

Ever since the documentary. ‘What the Health,’ was recently released on Netflix, I’ve been receiving e-mails from current and previous clients, asking, ‘What the what?’ I finally watched it the other day, and I have a few thoughts. Maybe more than a few. 

First, I do believe this documentary set out with good intentions. There are many important truths in there that I’ve been teaching for years now. Here are a few of them:

 

1- The connection between the food industry and government recommendations for diet is a real conflict of interest. In 2001 the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine sued the US government over the USDA food pyramid, and they won. It’s rare that the US government rules against the US government, but in this case, the evidence was cut and dry; most of the people on the board to create and review the USDA food pyramid had direct financial ties to the food industry, most specifically meat and dairy. The sponsorship from big processed food companies to foundations that should be rejecting their sponsorship, like Tyson who sponsors the American Cancer Society, is one thing this documentary got right. There is quite a crowd of foxes guarding the hen-house.

 

2- The second thing that’s accurate in the documentary, is the correlation between meat and overall risk for disease. The Cornell-Oxford-China study, an extensive study which looked at the correlation between animal protein and disease, found that if we eat up to eight percent of our daily caloric intake to be animal protein, there’s no increase in your risk for disease, but once you go beyond eight percent, there’s an exponential increase in your risk for all of the diseases and chronic illnesses tracked. When they looked at plant protein however, there was no increase in risk for disease, no matter how much plant protein was consumed. One likely reason for this is that animal products are acidic, and the more acidity in your body, the more inflammation, and inflammation is essentially the basis for all disease.

Eight percent may seem like a small amount of animal protein, but in fact even the Dietary Association of America agrees that we only need ten percent of our caloric intake to be protein, which is significantly lower than the standard American eats.

Aside from the inherent acidity in animal protein, there are other issues with meat in today’s world. As the documentary points out, farm factory animals are injected with hormones and antibiotics, are kept in truly horrifying and disease-breeding confinement, and the meat from these animals is then highly processed and treated with chemicals.

The link between animal protein and disease corresponds with the World Health Organization’s conclusions, which are also cited in the documentary. After looking at over 800 studies across the globe, the WHO classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen, and red meat as a Group 2a carcinogen.

 

3- I also appreciated the comments by Dr. Milton Mills in the documentary, who reminds us how the biggest, strongest mammals are all herbivores. Elephants and gorillas for instance eat a diet of mostly leafy greens and plant vegetation. I’ve said this exact thing to many of my clients. Dairy is not necessary for strong bones, unlike the myth that has been sold to us for decades by the dairy industry.

 

The documentary, however, starts to go off the rails when it makes some outlandish claims about diabetes and eggs. Let’s start with the eggs.

 

The Egg and Cholesterol Myth:

 

Some of you may remember my previous article debunking the myth that eating cholesterol causes high cholesterol (which I’ll be releasing again soon as a blog post). More than one doctor interviewed in ‘What the Health,’ discussed the harmful cholesterol in eggs. This is not how cholesterol works. Your body makes a certain amount of cholesterol, because it’s crucial for your health, and when you eat dietary cholesterol, your body simply produces less. On a side-note, Dr. Garth Davis states in the film that sugar doesn’t cause plaque to form in your vessels, and yet sugar has been shown to do exactly that. In fact eating sugar and refined flour, along with eating too much saturated fat, is one of the biggest causes of high cholesterol.

But back to eggs… Eggs do contain some saturated fat, and you definitely don’t want to consume too much saturated fat. Eggs also count as animal protein, which you want to keep to a minimum. I personally feel confident eating some organic, free-range eggs each week because I don’t eat meat, so my saturated fat and total animal protein intake is low, and in case you’re wondering, my cholesterol levels are great. But here’s what Dr. Weil, (a Harvard Medical school graduate who traveled the globe studying integrative health and nutrition, and also a teacher at my nutrition school) says on his website in response to the question of whether one should avoid eggs for cholesterol control: “The cholesterol in egg yolks doesn’t have as much impact on your serum cholesterol level as the saturated fat you eat in butter, cheese, and meat. The American Heart Association recommends limiting the amount of cholesterol you get from your diet to less than 300 mg daily (a single egg contains about 213 mg), but I wouldn’t worry about that. Instead, pay attention to your intake of saturated fat, and be careful how your eggs are prepared, keeping them free of butter or animal fat…. If you enjoy eggs, I see no reason why they should not be included in a healthy diet. Stick to those with high omega-3 content from organically raised chickens.”

Let’s look at the other claim made about eggs in the documentary. The Director and Narrator, Kip Anderson, says that he found a study that claims, “Eating one egg per day can be as bad for you as smoking 5 cigarettes per day for life expectancy.” What the WHAT!? In addition to the above misconception about eggs and cholesterol, this might have been a reference to the fact that processed meat and tobacco smoking were both classified as a group 1 carcinogen by the WHO. That doesn’t mean however that the two carry the same risk. Here’s what WHO says in the Q&A section on their website in answer to the question of whether processed meat and smoking cigarettes are equally dangerous: “No, processed meat has been classified in the same category as causes of cancer such as tobacco smoking and asbestos (IARC Group 1, carcinogenic to humans), but this does NOT mean that they are all equally dangerous. The IARC classifications describe the strength of the scientific evidence about an agent being a cause of cancer, rather than assessing the level of risk.” More importantly, lest we forget, eggs, while considered animal protein, are not considered a processed meat. The link between eggs and cancer risk was not even evaluated by the WHO.

 

Diabetes, Sugar and Weight Gain:

 

The next claim made my jaw hit the floor. Both Dr. Garth Davis (a weight-loss surgeon) and Dr. Neal Barnard (a best-selling author and vegan advocate) claim in the documentary that meat is responsible for diabetes, and not the over-consumption of sugar. Dr. Davis also claims that processed carbs don’t contribute to weight gain, and in fact have been shown to have an inverse effect. What the WHAT!!! Yes, unfortunately you read that correctly.

Before I dissect this, I want to mention that Dr. Neil Barnard was also a teacher at my nutrition school. My nutrition school was brilliantly set up (in my opinion) with back to back lectures which contradicted each other, so we might understand that there is no one right diet for everyone, and no one authority on health. Right after Neil Barnard showed us chart after chart with data proving how terrible having any meat in your diet was, an expert from the Weston Price foundation came in and proved, with just as many charts full of research, the exact opposite. Weston Price was a dentist who traveled the globe studying the diets of different cultures and their effect on dental and overall health. His findings showed that the largest health risks were due to flour, sugar, and processed vegetable oils, and found that unprocessed animal products seemed to be a part of some very healthy communities, like the Inuit whose diet largely consisted of fermented seal fat.

So, following the lead of my nutrition school, I present to you a wonderful documentary, ‘Fed Up,’ which came out a few years ago, that shows, with just as much conviction as this documentary, that Type II Diabetes is largely correlated with high sugar and refined flour intake. And here’s what another teacher from my nutrition school, Dr. Mark Hyman, says on the subject: “(Obesity and diabetes) is caused by the 152 pounds of sugar and 146 pounds of flour a year eaten on average by every American – that is a toxic drug dose of diabetes causing food.” Here’s his full article on the topic should you be interested: http://drhyman.com/blog/2014/12/18/7-ways-reverse-obesity-diabetes/

While animal protein and too much saturated fat provide a host of problems, cause inflammation, and likely also contribute to risk for diabetes, it is the constant spiking of blood sugar levels, the over-production of insulin by the pancreas on a regular basis, and the resulting jaded insulin receptors (insulin resistance) that causes Type 2 Diabetes. The amount of research and data on this is readily available, as is the commonly known fact that the sugar industry has spent a lot of money over the years trying to shift the blame for obesity and diabetes to fat.

But honestly, you can figure out the answer to this debate yourself by simply paying attention. Here’s a testimonial from a past participant of my sugar detox who has Type II diabetes: “Two days in and my blood sugar readings were in the normal range WITHOUT insulin! Hasn’t happened in years!” Bruce Parks, VT.

‘What the Health’ also failed to distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Type 1 is an autoimmune disorder, and the exact causes are unclear, although may have something to do with the inflammatory and toxic food in the standard American diet, while Type 2 diabetes is almost exclusively diet-caused.

As far as Dr. Garth Davis’s claim that eating sugar and refined carbs has nothing to do with weight gain, it’s simply irresponsible. When you consume more glucose than you can use for energy at any given time, the extra glucose gets stored as fat. In fact it’s the insulin that gets released when you eat sugar, that sparks the fat-storing process. I haven’t eaten meat since I was 13 years old, and yet my weight has certainly fluctuated, always having to do with the amount of sugar and refined carbs I’ve eaten. Of course, there’s a huge difference between good and bad carbs, the good ones being real, whole food, like fruits, vegetables and whole grains. For a better understanding of the glycemic index and how it relates to weight gain, you can refer to my previous post: https://healthyjaime.com/calorie-counting-vs-glycemic-index/

 

I’ll end on a note of agreement with the documentary, which is the correlation between diet and disease. On this, I wholeheartedly agree. ‘What the Health’ begins with the famous Hippocrates quote: ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.’

In the meantime, if you get confused by the slew of never-ending diametrically opposed dietary theories, here’s the best diet advice I’ve heard yet, and it comes from Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Rules: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Amen to that.