A heavily biased view on veganism, cherry picked data and a lot of blatantly false information. I watched: What the Health. If you want a documentary that tries to convince you to become vegan, loads misconception and skewing of data, this one is for you.
The point of this post is not to bash veganism (I know it works for a lot of people and no one needs to feel attacked here), it’s to get you to question things you see and hear. If you know it’s wrong or have questionable doubt, do your research, speak up about it and question it! It’s not about what concept is ‘best’, it’s about knowing the truth. I’m not going to spend this whole post dissecting each part of the documentary (even though I started and had about 4 pages of content), because Rob Wolf already did a pretty good job here, and I might just be beating the dead horse at that point since he touches on everything I wanted to say and goes into the nitty gritty pretty well.
Anyway...
1. I’d like to start off with this is the perfect example of biased information. This documentary, aside being laced with bad data and almost impossible get through without screaming at the tv at least once. It also “cherry picks” the data that supports their cause for framing animal products as being bad. It basically shoves in your face a one sided [vegan] argument with no counter arguments for any other side. Many, if not all of the people interviewed for this piece are vegan, and well all know a sound scientific argument takes all matters into consideration and uses the data to then state the truth. Oh right, and this guy is not a scientist. He is a self proclaimed hypochondriac that knows how to use google.
2. I'm also noting that there is no one diet that works for everyone. Everyone is different. This documentary seemingly singles out Veganism as being the only way to live a healthy life and you’re pretty much wrong, and horribly sick if you do otherwise. In fact, there are many diets that are healthy and we don’t really know what works best for everyone.
3. Misunderstanding of biological mechanisms and how the body works, this is where I really started questioning the validness of this whole movie. I have to say that one of my favorite lines of the whole documentary happens within the first 10 minutes, where an actual doctor (Garth Davis, MD) explains that your body “can not turn carbohydrates into fat”, and is only stored as glycogen. While storing carbs as glycogen is true, your body then turns the glycogen into fat if it’s not used up, so saying that the body can’t turn carbs into fat is false! [I talk more about carbs here if you're curious]
4. A lot of the data they use is correlative. This is simple stats 101. They show graphs of milk consumption being positively correlated with the rise of osteoporosis and cancer rates, which when blasted in your face is concerning...for one second. We all know [or should know] that bit about how shark attacks are positively related to the consumption of ice cream, it’s not because eating ice cream makes you more prone to shark attacks, there’s a third factor in play: it’s summer and people are probably swimming more and eating ice cream because of the warm weather as a by product. A perfect example of how correlation does not mean causation. If you sit and think for a few minutes, milk consumption being positively correlated with rising rates osteoporosis and cancer could be simply due to general population increasing and increased longevity in humans. If we are growing in numbers and living longer, we’re bound to see a rise in disease rates as well. Therefore, using this logic, we cannot conclude that milk consumption is causing disease, and we need a lot more information to make a decision.
A few graphical notes I wanted to add from Rob Wolf's post, I thought these were good ways to see general data sets to form a broad representation of cancer and other disease. Above we see that cancer and heart disease are actually in general decreasing as a whole over time. Below we see in light blue are the increasing cancer rates are generally due to population growth and aging, not so much other increased risk factors such as meat, sugar or environmental factors. Although, they still do play a part in some cancers.
5. Misuse and skewing of data. Some of the studies that they continuously mention work with in vitro data, which can't be directly related back to what's going on inside humans, in vitro should be used as evidence that the studies should move into an in vivo model. And lastly, statistically speaking, they use relative risk instead of the absolute risk to skew their viewpoint, again, a common practice of the media modeling data to better show what supports their view. [I don't feel this is a great way to display data but, it's what makes money]
Above easily explains why presenting the data using relative risk usually sounds better than what the absolute risk is, which gives you a truer impact of what's really going on.
These points alone made me want to shout from the roof tops and throw my computer through the tv screen, but I’ll try and keep my composure here and get to the point of what I really want to say. We need to know data can and is being skewed and misused to try to make a better argument for the point the sellers want to make. Making ourselves aware of the situation and questioning information we are being fed needs to be practiced more than just gobbling it up.
Of course there were some good points that I could take from it--and I’d hate to totally count those out.
1. We should be questioning how are food is being treated and where it’s coming from. I agree a lot with this view, our food could be handled and treated a lot better.
2. They also bring up a good point about where these health associations are getting their money. However, that’s already been done by the previous doc, Fed Up, when we learned major processed food and soda corporations were funding Michelle Obama’s get moving program--which started as a healthy eating program. But again, this should be questioned for all studies and programs, learn who funds them and see why they seek and display information the way the do--it happens everywhere!
3. Nutrition has a lot to do with helping to prevent disease. However, nutrition is still a very complicated subject, we have many different views and solutions. We are researching more about it everyday but we still don't have all the facts.
**My former classmate is doing a study on herself inspired by What the Health, where she is going vegan for 14 days to see what changes in her body and to try and replicate some of the claims made by this documentary. Follow her journey here.
The take home:
There’s a lot of information out there. Make sure you do your own research with aspects you have reasonable doubt about to validate your inquiries before forming your opinions. Stay Curious!
Tell me what you think: Email me here lifeapothecary@gmail.com
![Eat Yo Greens! [and not ONLY because your Mom said so.]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/94c8f9_b7788a6c1b384adfb8afac0db67caf00~mv2_d_1836_3264_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_175,h_311,fp_0.50_0.50,q_90,enc_auto/94c8f9_b7788a6c1b384adfb8afac0db67caf00~mv2_d_1836_3264_s_2.jpg)
