Y’all have probably already seen the movie making its rounds on Netflix: Game Changer.
Now this is not going to be an in-depth analysis of everything that’s wrong or right with this movie with scientific references to back it up.
Because here’s the deal: you can find scientific studies on almost anything to back up your agenda.
The problem with the majority of science today is it is deliberately designed to make for a specific outcome due to vested interests (one of the movie producers of Game Changer sells pea protein for a living, just saying). So the solution is to use your brain and consider whether things make sense. Logical reasoning is something we don’t use very much anymore, to the point where we will almost believe anything if the sentence “science” follows.
There is a huge difference between whether the “so-called science” is done on men, women, old, young, athletes, overweight, underweight, someone with a history of addiction or just your plain old average sedentary Joe.
These segments do not share the same biochemical blueprint nor do they metabolize foods the same way and their requirements to perform optimally for their life is very different. If these differences are not taken into account, extremist advice of cutting out entire food groups or going high-fat or low-fat etc. can do more harm than good.
We can often find a certain level of evidence for almost anything we want to argue for. But the pet-peeve is that we cannot rely on isolated data alone.
Cherry-picking what we want to find and discarding results or factors that don’t align with our agenda.
That is the reason why “The China Study” is one of the most flawed studies of all, which has served as inspiration for movies such as “Game Changer”. This was one of the first books to make a big call for going vegan, and yet the data just doesn’t add up. I wrote my bachelor’s project back in the day about this very study, it is as old as shoulder-pads. No one wants a heyday for shoulder-pads and neither should this study get any more attention, it is a has-been.
The studies in "The China Study along with the cases presented in the movie Game Changer are selectively chosen in order to focus on meat as being the key issue.
This is bad science - you cannot have an agenda from the get-go, and you cannot make correlation turn into causation.
In most cases you will have other factors at play - and this means the factor you happen to be looking at, may indeed not be the determining factor, or even matter at all.
It is similar to, let’s say, if you date 5 blondes and you conclude all blondes are airheads. This is the level of science we are dealing with here.
Now it may be very true that many airheads choose to bleach their hair and get silicone boobs, duck lips, wear fake nails og blow up their instagram with half-naked pictures taken from the toilet to god-knows-where with random carpe diem wannabe philosophical non-sense hashtags attached. However, if we conclude that this means all blonde hair colors are per definition airheads, we are kinda missing the boat. Bimbos may have an affinity for choosing these things, just as people who don’t care about health, will eat everything - which happens to include meat. Now many of them will also eat tomatoes, as it goes well on their spaghetti, pizza and burgers. With this logic, we might think that tomatoes could be the issue, if we are to focus on that.
Ok, I see some of you rolling your eyes right about here “surely, you’re not saying that bacon and pork belly every day is good for you?”. No I am absolutely not. We have data showing that people on a high-meat, high-fat keto diet will suffer elevated triglycerides and imbalance of blood lipids, if followed religiously for 6 months plus. And not just relying on science here - we know that people who live the longest are not heavy meat-eaters i.e. referring to the so-called “Blue Zones” here.
We have a lot of science to back up that eating MAINLY plan-based with lots of whole foods, fresh produce - but still including quantities of meat - are tied to longevity.
Still taking into account that different people require slight different percentages of their main macros due to biochemical distinctions incl. health history, ethnicity, age, gender, stress-levels both mentally and physically etc.
In Game Changer we meet people, some of whom have never eaten a vegetable before and lived off processed foods.
Sure, they skipped meat, but more importantly: they switched from a crap-diet to a whole-food based diet.
You just cannot compare a junk-food diet to that of a health-conscious vegan. OF COURSE introducing vegetables into your diet and dropping the big macs are going to be a game changer - that’s called healthy eating, where the selected individuals also happen to avoid meat.
If we are to compare whether eating meat is the game changer, we need to compare a group of health-conscious meat-eaters with a group of health-conscious vegans. And we need to follow up on that data after 3 months after 6 months and after a year. Because hormones typically take a year til impacted. This is also why we find a lot of especially men, dealing with low testosterone after following a vegan diet for extended periods of time, even though it made them feel good to begin with.
What works in the short run does not necessarily work in the long run.
And this is very important to understand: just like we don’t continue cleaning our house, because it looks great after we cleaned the floors, we don’t continue to clean the floors, thinking “oh gosh almighty don’t they look great - let’s continue washing the floors for the next year everyday in a row”. Those floors are going to look haggard, if we continue washing them to the bone.
Same goes for our diet. We might feel great after a much-needed juice fast or low-fat vegan diet, it gives our liver and digestion a break, which makes us feel lighter. But if we go by the same logic as with the floors - and we continue to eat very fanatic and eliminate entire nutrient-groups, our body will start looking aged. Our hormones decline, our skin gets saggy, we might begin to suffer hairloss and bone-loss and men typically experience suffering all sorts of sexual dysfunction issues. All because we are not understanding that we need to get the right building blocks back into our body.
As our body changes, so do our nutrient needs - and we should be flexible and adapt to that.
Typical lab result in from a client not getting their amino acid needs met from their diet - this client is flexitarian, they do sometimes eat meat, but not everyday and mainly plant-based, but not focused on legumes. It just goes to show how difficult it is to get the nutrients we need from today’s depleted soil.
Now this is not to say you can’t be vegan and meet your body’s nutrient needs. It is absolutely possible, even though it is not realistic for most of us. Hemp and pea protein is up there compared to whey protein and they are a solid alternative. But how many protein smoothies do you want in a day is kinda the question. And also, considering Game Changer is focused on athletes with a much higher energy demand and calorie output, it will be easier for them to get their nutrient needs met through a vegan diet, because they are going through tons and tons of food everyday.
Most plant eating animals are eating constantly and pretty active along with that - compare your lifestyle to theirs to see if that makes sense. For the average Joe who goes to the gym a couple times a week and has a desk job - we would gain weight from eating that amount of calories. Yet we could get our nutrient needs met for less calories from meat.
Now I don’t believe in going calorie crazy - or even counting them.
But it is common sense to be aware of you would need approx. 400 calories from beans to get same amount of amino acids as from 100 calories coming from, say, chicken.
It is also a fact that we can be overweight yet undernourished - why it is not atypical for people to experience a sense of being stuffed in the stomach from eating too many carbs, but still feeling hungry cos their protein and fat requirements are not met and so they have a difficult time stopping eating due to our hunger hormone ghrelin not being sufficiently suppressed from high-carb meals.
Don’t guess, just test.
Test your hormones and your amino acids along with your minerals and vitamin B12. What do they tell you about what your body is actually in need of? Guessing gets us no-where and following food-ideas, as if they are our new-found religion is not a healthy mental state to be in.
And don’t we all kinda hate that person who can only eat dairyfree, meatfree, soyfree, nutfree, gluteinfree, ricefree and whateverfree muffins that we baked for their birthday. So we end up making something like a watermelon cut out like a cake with fake whipped cream from a coconut can. It’s like we have reached a point, where we think the devil is in the bread-section of the supermarket hiding behind a loaf bread. I am, however, not saying we don’t have a lot of issues with today’s toxic load and production methods.
The way we treat animals is horrific, to say the least.
There is no denying that it is not healthy to eat an animal, who has suffered in what is comparable to a concentration camp for the four-legged. It is disgusting ethically that this is legally going on, and eating all the fear hormones, antibiotics, cortisol etc. is not a great thing. But then again someone said, you can define a society by how they treat their weakest members - and so this goes to show that well, society is pretty disgusting at the moment.
There is a far cry from goin vegan to avoiding concentration camp-like settings for animals, though.
We should focus on solving that, rather than all this extremist thinking when it comes to food.
If we look at where people live the longest - the so-called “Blue-Zones” - we are looking at people who eat very much plant-based, but they do not cut out any food group. They get their b12 and zinc through meat (typically older animals that have lived a rich life in a healthy outdoors setting), they get they butyric acid for gut flora and saturated fats for the cell membranes from butter. They are not fanatic, food is not a religion to them. They drink wine (but a glass, not a bottle), they eat dessert (but a slice and not every day), they are active every day (but don’t live in the gym and suffer oxidative stress from over-exercising).
We need to eat for the demands of the world we live in (stress-tolerance), our biochemical blueprint and health history, the depleted soil as well as thinking sustainability into the picture.
Extremism only fosters agression and segregation - why we have people on both ends of the food religion specter (keto and paleo vs. vegans) going bonkers right now, as if they are fighting over their right to exist as a human. It is ridiculous, and obviously both can’t be right - or can they? Well, if we again think about the laws of nature and the body’s need to detox and repair and rebuild, then we can see a need for both ways - but not all the time.
The laws of nature and the changing seasons show us there is a time for feasting on meat, grains and dairy come Fall and Winter i.e. following more keto-like principles (hold the grains). And there is a season to fast i.e. following more vegan like principles: eat lightly and focus on foods available in Spring like berries, greens, sprouts, potatoes, rice and perhaps some fish (although not vegan obviously).
Different seasons has given us access to a variety of foods. When following “seasonal eating” and taking our ethnicity into account as this has an impact on our genes, we live in harmony with nature and change our eating based on seasons, which in change gives our body time to either repair and build up (Fall and Winter) or detox and rejuvenate (Spring and Summer).
I find that a lot of so-called bio-hacking today centers around just getting us back in sync with nature.
Ironically there is really not much hacking to that, only making up for a man-made mess of technology that is stressing our body to the breaking point (hello 5G health disaster) and depletion of our soil. I.e. we are buying blue-light blockers (protecting us from man-mad devices that is messing with our melatonin, serotonin and cortisol output), paying for red light therapy (available through the sun) and taking shit-loads of supplements to make-up for an extreme diet and depleted soil.
We try to reinvent everything only to figure out no one is smarter than nature.
Nature has an inbuilt intelligence that man can never outperform. Whenever we try, we end up tipping the board too far in one direction, not understanding that we need to understand the whole and not selective parts. Basically we are to eat whole foods, seasonally and in sync with where we live, while considering our genetic heritage and our everyday requirements.
As an end note I thought it was fascinating that the Japanese who where by large vegans, introduced meat during world war 2.
They did this because they found they were not resilient enough in battle with a plant-based diet. Now this is a great example of being flexible with your food and changing it to meet your lifestyle’s ever-changing demands. Few of us live on an island in Paradise where we can surf and meditate all day with little stress, and thus have low cortisol output and would be fine with a plant-based diet. We need to eat for the demands we need to meet, which may change in time - and so should our eating.