You Are What You Eat is a Netflix documentary about a study with twins to evaluate the impact of food on our bodies. I love these studies with twins. I find it fascinating. Two genetically identical people are the best way to understand how things affect our bodies.
Vegan vs Omnivorous
In this study, one of the twins would eat vegan food for eight weeks, while the other one would eat an omnivorous diet, yet the most healthy possible, and see how that impacts their bodies.
They had different measurements like weight, blood pressure, and biological age of the cells… and they wanted to see what would happen in this short period of time.
I'm not a defender of a vegan diet, nor do I think meat is bad for your health, yet, due to the conditions in which our food is created, I was expecting a better impact in the vegan diet twin from the beginning.
It’s about everything
The show is about the study itself, but it is also about showing what is wrong with our food. You see animal farms, how cattle and chickens are raised, as well as some procedures of fish farming that honestly were what shocked me the most.
I'm from a country where we eat a lot of fish and see it as very healthy. This documentary showed me that we have no idea what we eat… Some things were alarming.
They also focused on the environmental impact of such mass production in an obvious, informative way without lecturing the viewers, which is a total bonus.
Biased?
I liked the documentary; it was very informative, and I want to experiment with new food. They showed some alternatives to meat that looked delicious and made me want to try them. Yet, something bothered me.
The study was supposed to be about discovering, and in the end, I felt they were trying to prove, at any cost, that a vegan diet was better.
All markers seemed to be improved, except that all vegan twins lost muscle mass, and they didn't focus on that enough. They said, "Oh, you probably didn't eat enough. You need to eat more calories," but I felt it was mostly ignored.
This doesn't erase all the good vegan diet did, but it would be more honest to explore this fact and explain how to avoid it since the vegan diet clearly had more benefits than the omnivorous one.
An interesting experiment
The whole documentary was very interesting, and I enjoyed it. You Are What You Eat is worth watching, but it should be less like an ad for a vegan lifestyle and more like a scientific impartial study.
My advice is to watch it, not to convince you to change your diet but to have more information and a clear notion of what you eat.
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