Let me start by clarifying: I'm not a vegan.
I understand the reason for the lifestyle choice and I don't argue against it or assume that every vegan wants to shove their ideals down my throat. For me, I find that I can maintain a healthy lifestyle consuming animal products by playing close attention to labels and where they come from. And no, I'm not an organic-only, strictly Whole Foods shopping snob either. That being said, I do have a constant curiosity for finding the best and most natural diets for longevity and health.
I was intrigued when I discovered the creators of "Cowspiracy," a pro-vegan documentary intended to demonstrate how a plant-based diet is beneficial to the Earth's long-term sustainability, had created a follow-up documentary titled "What The Health."
After I first watched "Cowspiracy," I found that the producers made a lot of valid points that encouraged me to become more conscious of what my meat and dairy consuming lifestyle was doing to the Earth. Although it wasn't enough for me to go full-vegan (I cannot stop eating eggs or honey, I'm sorry), I started to think about the little things I could do, like switching out a few of my meals a week for a vegan option.
Based on the hype of What the Health, I thought that it would further influence a change to my daily consumption of animal products. Instead, I found myself mostly confused at the exaggerated claims made throughout the documentary. As it turns out, I wasn't the only one that found it difficult to accept what the documentary was attempting to tell the world. For the few valid points made throughout, there were three more claims that made me uneasy about the legitimacy of the "facts" given.
Welcome to the rollercoaster of my subconscious as I sat through over an hour of random facts that were created with the purpose of demonstrating how a plant-based diet can be an alternative to chronic pain and illness, but instead came off as a questionable vegan-agenda.
At The Start...
1. I'm pretty healthy. For an adult living on a college budget, I do well by eating mostly organic meats and eat a lot of whole superfoods when I can sneak them into my diet.
2. But there was last Thursday night when I ate a ten-piece nugget from McDonald's... and the night after when I decided to pizza was a good idea.
3. OK, focus. You eat healthy 80 percent of the time. That's what is expected of a college student.
Getting Into It...
4. So, the opening scene is about diabetes. My family history is negative in that department, and I exercise 6 days a week. Where is this going?
5. OK, sir, why are you avoiding the topic of diet and its effects on diabetes. I NEED ANSWERS.
6. Finally, getting around to those answers I was after.
7. I just snorted — as if we didn't know bacon and sausage were bad for us. I don't eat heaps of bacon drenched in grease at Sunday brunch for its superfood health benefits.
8. If I eat a piece of bacon, I'm going to get cancer? Interesting.
9. So now eating a hotdog at a Phillies game is just as bad as me smoking cigarettes?
10. I'll give you that it does seem a bit sketchy that it promotes the consumption of various meats that other studies have found detrimental to overall health, but there has to be a reason for that, right?
11. Surely, food isn't the only reason that leads to humans developing cancer.
12. I did not expect to be this on edge about the discussion of food and its link to chronic illnesses so early on. I really wanted to have an open mind, but now you've attacked bacon one too many times.
13. "Two-thirds of adults are overweight." Unfortunately, I believe that without too much convincing.
14. If my diet is already worse than smoking because I eat organic chicken and consume eggs regularly, I give up. Pass the cigarettes.
17. AND carbs don't make me fat? So why did I give up bread again?
18. So far this documentary is telling me I can eat Oreos, Olive Garden Breadsticks and take up smoking cigarettes like the cool Parisians do all the while avoiding diabetes. I could get used to this.
The Dairy Debacle...
21. Flash pan of a cow. Does this mean we are getting into my favorite topic?
22. Yes. We're talking about dairy. BRING ON THE YOGURT AND CHEESE.
23. Not even a minute into my favorite topic and you are RUINING it by referring to cheese as "cow pus." Make it stop.
24. To the doctor on-screen that made the very valid point that milk from a cow is legitimately baby cow nutrient meant to help calves grow to full sized adult cows — you are the first person to make a point in this documentary that not only makes sense, but actually draws me into the cause.
25. As a species obsessed with fitness trends and diets that rely on consuming as much protein as possible, it's weird to learn that the human milk produced by our bodies for child development has the lowest protein content of any species tested.
26. "Milk does not build strong bones." You had me and then you lost me.
27. My entire childhood was a 'Got Milk?' campaign. How are you going to tell me that milk has no correlation to the strength of my bones?
28. Everything I eat has been attacked in the last forty minutes of my life. Nothing is safe.
29. On a less defensive front, listening to a registered dietary nutritionist tell me that studies show milk and dairy products in general are a huge part of what puts our bodies at risk for cancer makes me want to run to my fridge and throw away my Greek yogurt and gallon of chocolate milk.
30. I'm not going to do that though.
31. I'm not crazy.
32. Just intrigued enough to read more into it and decide for myself if this is necessary.
33. I expected nothing less that cheese consumption triggers the same receptors in the brain as a dose of heroin. These are the facts I came here for.
The North Carolina Pig Problem...
34. North Carolina is so lucky to have so many pigs around!
35. OK, it's been 30 seconds and I automatically regret that thought.
36. North Caroline isn't just home to heaps of pigs. It's home to pig farming and slaughter houses meant to provide most of America with its pork products.
37. Even as someone that isn't interested in a vegan lifestyle, it's still saddening, and hard to alter or make up the true stories of people who live in the areas surrounding these pig farms. Areas that are plagued by disease and asthma in correlation to their close proximity to the waste dumping that leads to air and water contamination.
39. "The pharmaceutical industry sells 80 percent of all the antibiotics that it makes in the United States to animal agriculture," said the Center for Food Safety senior attorney Paige Tomaselli.
39. It's even more unsettling that the senior policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety said most of their attempts to collect information on these topics from drug companies results in receiving pages of blacked out documentation.
40. Sketchy.
41. Calling North Carolina the feces and urine capital of the world just doesn't have the same positive ring as "first in flight."
42. Again with the pus!
The Vegan Cure...
43. Ah, the moment we were all waiting for. The individuals that we met early on in the documentary that suffered from chronic pain that they masked with baskets of prescription medicine are now living a plant-based diet that cured them of their ailments.
44. Wow, my subconscious is quite judgmental and defensive when it comes to consuming animal products.
45. I guess like a serial skeptic, I'd have to test the theory myself to truly believe in the effects of a plant-based diet on overall joint pain.
The Aftermath And All Of The Questions I Still Have...
46. Although I'm not ready to go as far as reading into the claim that egg consumption effects your health in the same way smoking cigarettes does, I'm right there with the message of this documentary that there's a bit of sketchiness going on with the major health corporations that claim to be actively protecting American citizens.
But I still have questions.
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