"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Upton Sinclair
The reviews of What the Health on Netflix and debunking videos on Youtube make it clear we are a culture that has been influenced by "studies" conflicted by ties to the meat and dairy industries. But don’t get me wrong, I applaud the paleo diet, it is way better than the standard American diet (any whole food diet that removes refined and processed foods would be), but does it prevent and reverse heart disease? Nope. Type 2 diabetes? Partially (it does not address the cause of insulin resistance, a topic beyond this post). Autoimmune disorders? Nope.
And it becomes clear why this is important in the larger context when we consider that drugs do not heal these conditions either, and it’s not because the drugs “just aren’t good enough yet”. The body heals itself when we “just get out of it’s way”. Given sufficiently conducive conditions the body is a self-maintaining self-healing organism. Some of the damage we’ve unintentionally self-inflicted over the years cannot be undone, but most of it can, enough for radical transformations of health, vitality, and happiness. People who experience this first hand are typically amazed by the speed and depths of transformation, asking “why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”.
We are by and large happy to accept the “bacon is good” studies that make the headlines as they confirm long held pre-existing cultural biases. We consequently do not know about the mountain of research showing animal products are not good for us, but a whole foods plant based diet is optimal for health and happiness. The weight of the evidence is the critical issue here, and it is overwhelmingly on the side of plant based nutrition.
Why do we, the general public, not know this? It’s pretty simple on one level...multi-billion dollar industries have no vested interest in promoting this fact to media or lobbying it to congress. And they do have vested interest in opposing in every way possible science that is detrimental to their bottom line.
A few decades ago there were thousands of studies showing that smoking was bad for health, and a couple hundred studies (with ties to the tobacco industry) showing that it was benign, or maybe even good in certain respects. It wasn’t until the Surgeon General's warning appeared on tobacco products that the balance was finally tipped, and the public stopped smoking in large numbers.
It is worth asking -- why was the government slow to respond to the mountain of evidence showing smoking was clearly harmful to health? There is a one word answer -- revenue. The government does not “make money”, it only collects it from the individuals and businesses within its jurisdiction. Revenues from large businesses are not always visible, but they are there nonetheless. And of course governments have a vested interest in protecting revenues.
Tobacco is one monolithic industry, but this situation is vastly more complex, with huge multi-national industries deriving trillions from “disease management” (rather than disease prevention), along with the industries that “feed” these disease epidemics -- agribusiness, packaged foods (grocery), and the fast food outlets we see everywhere we look in our cities and along our highways.
There is also a deeper psychological/cultural issue: most people never really thought of smoking as good for health, at best they thought it was benign but pleasurable. But we have been brought up to think animal products are not only good for us, but necessary for robust health. Animal protein was "high quality" protein, and plant protein was substandard. The news, based on science, is leaking out gradually that the reverse is actually true. Many (if not most) cannot believe it, and even shocked by the mere suggestion. This also adds to the complexity of an overall shift toward a health promoting approach to nutrition.
(For a complete discussion of the history of nutrition science and cultural biases toward nutrition I recommend the book "Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition" by Colin Campbell PhD, arguably the most important nutrition scientist of our time.)
The system is sick, and there are trillions of annual dollars vested in its continuation and propagation. We might reasonably conclude from this a system-wide health promoting approach may be a long time coming. Meanwhile, those of us who have gained direct experience of healing in self and others can chose a better approach, and provide quiet example of our own successes.
Meanwhile the film does advance facts without really supporting them in the film. The vast majority of criticism I've seen dismisses WTH out of hand on this issue, but most also do not realize there’s a page on the film’s website with links to hundreds of studies supporting the film’s contentions, ready to explore to one's own satisfaction. And if you really want to get into it you will quickly discover this list of studies is only the tip of a very large iceberg.
The film is emotionally biased, it’s true, but I’m not sure how it could not be -- more than 50% of the developed world is sick to one degree or another, and yet there continues to be little recognition that poor diet is the proximate cause.
And if that were not enough reason for emotional bias, animal agriculture also has huge destructive impact to the earth's ecology, also increasingly documented by science. All told these are critical issues for the individual and for global societies, while the science showing a better way becomes more and more clear by the year. Meanwhile that science continues to be actively suppressed and kept from us, the public, quite successfully, judging by the critical comment What the Health has elicited. So yes, of course there is impatience and emotional bias, this is one of the more critical issues of our time.
