I will preface this review by stating 2 things: 1. I am a researcher by profession. I regularly review health studies for a living and analyze the strength of evidence and how to share results with the public. 2. I only had the patience to watch the first 30 minutes of this documentary.
Where to start about this movie? From watching the first 30 minutes of this documentary, it is easy to tell what Kip Andersen's objective is for this film: to uncover the "conspiracy" that corporations are "covering up" evidence that animal products are linked with common diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Here is the predicable format: tell personal story, talk to a couple experts, show animation of "stuff in body", flash a peer reviewed study on screen showing evidence, call an 800 number for national organization demanding to know why their organization is advocating something that goes against the conclusion of this single study, and act very angry and justified in your belief of the "cover up" because person on the phone cannot answer your question.
This documentary has all the hallmarks of bad communication on scientific studies. First, one study reaching a conclusion is not "proof" of anything. You need to have multiple studies that show the same type of result. Second, association is not causation. That would be like observing that children who are tutored average worse grades than children who were not tutored and concluding that tutoring causes lower grades. There are other factors that you need to account for. They might be hard to measure, but they might be the real cause that two things are associated. Third, "increased risk" measures can be misleading on the surface. For example, a study could say that drinking milk was associated a 50% increase in the risk of developing cancer. This sounds frightening! But read further and you could find that 1% of one group had cancer and 1.5% of the other group had cancer. Does that really sound so scary after all?
At any rate, I don't think that everything that the film presented is false. I do think there are harms associated with the consumption of animal products, particularly processed meats. However, the way this film presents the evidence does not make a sound argument and the approach to presenting the material was so predictable and repetitive!
Where to start about this movie? From watching the first 30 minutes of this documentary, it is easy to tell what Kip Andersen's objective is for this film: to uncover the "conspiracy" that corporations are "covering up" evidence that animal products are linked with common diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Here is the predicable format: tell personal story, talk to a couple experts, show animation of "stuff in body", flash a peer reviewed study on screen showing evidence, call an 800 number for national organization demanding to know why their organization is advocating something that goes against the conclusion of this single study, and act very angry and justified in your belief of the "cover up" because person on the phone cannot answer your question.
This documentary has all the hallmarks of bad communication on scientific studies. First, one study reaching a conclusion is not "proof" of anything. You need to have multiple studies that show the same type of result. Second, association is not causation. That would be like observing that children who are tutored average worse grades than children who were not tutored and concluding that tutoring causes lower grades. There are other factors that you need to account for. They might be hard to measure, but they might be the real cause that two things are associated. Third, "increased risk" measures can be misleading on the surface. For example, a study could say that drinking milk was associated a 50% increase in the risk of developing cancer. This sounds frightening! But read further and you could find that 1% of one group had cancer and 1.5% of the other group had cancer. Does that really sound so scary after all?
At any rate, I don't think that everything that the film presented is false. I do think there are harms associated with the consumption of animal products, particularly processed meats. However, the way this film presents the evidence does not make a sound argument and the approach to presenting the material was so predictable and repetitive!