Veganism über Alles

Pop science documentary You Are What You Eat hit Netflix on January first like a drop of water in hot oil, perfectly timed to coincide with millions of people kicking off their new year’s resolution diets. The series, which not-so-subtly endorses a meatless diet, landed on Netflix’s top ten list as X users and YouTubers debated the validity of the science behind the show. Its premise is straightforward and watchable: a group of identical twins change their lifestyles and diets (one vegan, one omnivore) for eight weeks to explore how food choices impact their overall health. But the big question behind the experiment–can we change our underlying biochemistry with our forks?– plays second banana, so to speak, to what feels like a brand campaign via personally-invested experts who cherry-pick tranches of wobbly research to reinforce their vegan messaging.

Cameras follow four of the 22 pairs of twins as they gamely tap tablets in cognitive tests, huff on treadmills and lie on body composition scanners for baseline tests in sunny, state-of-the-art facilities. One squirmy scene finds both pairs of female twins selecting adult films together for a (thankfully solo) thermography test to measure arousal via a FLIR camera pointed at a table with stirrups. “Just let me know when you’re starting the pornography,” chirps a nurse. Netflix apparently took it upon itself to piggyback off the nocturnal erection study in The Game Changers: nutrition scientist and trial author Christopher Gardner says the FLIR test wasn’t part of the study he designed as he didn’t consider it an “appropriate topic,” and only found out about it after the documentary screening.

The twins’ health journey interweaves with discussions about the ecological, nutritional and ethical implications of animal agriculture via chockablock vignettes about feedlot hog feces sprayed on homes, farmed salmon swimming through clouds of waste, and New York Mayor Eric Adams reversing his diabetes by going vegan. The series finds viewers nodding politely at a crowd of plant-based interest group leaders, marketers, activists, scientists, business owners and politicians offering unchallenged opinions and sloppily abstracted data about meat processing and consumption while ignoring the same problems on their side of the table.

With a growing public interest in plant-based and sustainable diets, many are rethinking the environmental and ethical implications of their food choices–and filmmakers are capitalizing on the trend with projects linked to interest groups and venture firms who stand to profit from the contentious politics of health and nutrition. Series director Louis Psihoyos (The Cove) is comfortable stretching the bounds of creative license and scientific rigor in the name of ethical eating. The Vogt Foundation, a philanthropic institution that finances “organizations that protect animals and promote plant-based products” funded his buzzy 2018 doc The Game Changers, which profiled famous vegan athletes to prove that alpha dudes don’t need meat to be manly. Foundation president Kyle Vogt executive produced The Game Changers, and the Vogt Foundation also financed the Stanford twin trial profiled in You Are What You Eat.

The vegan pie

Almost every person featured in the documentary has their finger in the vegan pie, including Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown and Miyoko Schinner, founder of the self-named fake cheese company valued at $260 million (one scene features Schinner in a food lab, trying and failing to create a cheese pull from the 62^nd iteration of a faux liquid cheese). Several others have authored recent books and/or profit from diet plans, consulting and speaking engagements, or health and wellness products. Study author Gardner has also received funding for other projects from Beyond Meat. With the global plant-based food market clearing almost $43 billion last year, politicized agendas and financial interests are looking to steer popular opinion away from animal products with easily consumable commercial science. Meanwhile, plant-based proponents continue to castigate animal agriculture for funding special-interest research that doubles as a product endorsement.

Gather Ventures, a venture capital firm focused exclusively on plant-based food, funded Forks Over Knives, a 2011 documentary that claims a vegan diet can help control chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes. Director James Cameron executive produced The Game Changers, which criticized studies funded by the meat and dairy industries, while owning the largest pea protein company in America. The documentary also endorsed Hass avocados using research funded by the Hass Avocado Board.

Our intrepid twins keep plugging away at their diets and workouts in brief clips and interview snippets, but the experiment’s rigor and integrity begin to feel crowded out by all the social messaging. The subjects mostly self-guide their workouts and prepare their own food for the last four weeks, and if Gardner adjusts for self-reporting honesty in adhering to the diet/exercise regime, the series never mentions it. The body composition scans were too costly to measure the entire trial group, so that data is only available for the eight documentary participants. And while the study acknowledges its tiny sample size and shortened time frame, it fails to address significant confounding lifestyle factors like smoking, drinking and stress.

When you render a scientific stud as entertainment, its data becomes as creatively pliable as any other production element. 2014 film Cowspiracy inflated livestock emissions data by counting non-additive respirant CO₂, tripling the scientific consensus measurement from 15% to 51%. 2017’s What the Health (from the same production team) claimed that eating an egg is equivalent to smoking 5 cigarettes in lowering life expectancy; meanwhile the number of deaths linked to diets high in processed meat (classed as an actual carcinogen by the World Health Organization) was a mere three percent of the 1 million annual deaths from smoking.

Am I Blue Zone?

Dan Buettner followed his best-selling Blue Zone book franchise with 2023’s Secrets of the Blue Zones, which claimed one of the main “secrets” to be a largely vegan diet while ignoring factors like chemical processing, seasonal eating, drinking and smoking. Buettner also excludes Blue Zones with high meat consumption like Hong Kong and Icelandic groups. His pie chart portraying the Ikarian diet doesn’t include dairy at all (to which nutritionist Mary Ruddick offers thoughtful counterpoint), and since Ikarians consider “red meat” to be beef, they didn’t report their almost-daily consumption of goat, lamb, pork or chicken. Buettner also did the studies in summer while fruits and vegetables were in season and failed to address the use of ghee, tallow and lard as traditional fats to cook vegetables and grains.

The facts in You Are What You Eat are often just as loose. One scary experiment tracks pathogens spread around a kitchen after one set of twins handles raw chicken. “No other food, including produce, is allowed to go to a grocery store carrying any pathogens,” declares one talking head– without mentioning that while the FDA regulates soil and water to grow produce, it hasn’t established any post-harvest microbial limits for fruits, vegetables, nuts or grains.

It would explain why a 2015 CDC study says produce causes nearly half of all food-borne illnesses compared to 22 percent caused by meat and poultry. Environmentalist George Monbiot (one of at least seven featured “experts” with a new book) repeats a common talking point that the animal ag industry is one of the greatest sources of greenhouse gases, while the EPA puts the percentage at 10 percent of total U.S. emissions behind industry, residential/commercial use and ironically, electric power. Monbiot also claims that the ag sector puts out double the global emissions of transportation, but this chart and this chart tell a different story.

Fritos are vegan too

So how did the vegan lab rats fare versus their omnivore siblings after eight weeks? With a diet lower in saturated fat and higher in fiber, vegans lost visceral fat and lowered fasting insulin levels to boost cardiovascular health–but their triglycerides, a risk factor for heart disease, went up. LDL “bad” cholesterol levels sank in the vegan group, but so did HDL–beneficial lipoproteins that help move LDL out of the bloodstream. The vegans’ vitamin B12 levels plummeted–a significant result considering their baseline levels were oddly much higher than the omnivores. The vegan group lost a measly average of 2.2 pounds, most of which was lean muscle and is likely linked with smaller meal portions, around 200 fewer calories per meal.

The documentary dodges veganism’s structural shortcomings because they’re the same problems Big Animal Ag encounters. The plant-based products that You Are What You Eat endorses can be ultra-processed, chemically modified and high in salt, fat and sugar to replicate taste. They often contain hormones, GMOs, refined oils, neurotoxins and petrochemicals that can cause heart disease and cancer, including additives, emulsifiers, texturizers, flavors, binders and colors. Miyoko’s plant-based mozzarella, for example, has as much saturated fat and almost twice the sodium of regular mozz. Impossible Food’s main ingredient is GMO soy protein, and Europe restricts their synthetic meat because its original recipe contains a genetically engineered protein that mimics blood.

A surprising number of familiar but gut-busting snacks are vegan like Fritos, Pringles, Pop Tarts, Doritos, french fries, potato chips, fruit candy, Takis, Nutter Butter and Oreos. Alternatively, a 20-year study of 65,000 women found that women who regularly ate an unprocessed plant-based diet—even if it included animal-based foods—were 14 percent less likely to develop breast cancer, while women who ate a sugary, fatty plant-based diet had a 20 percent higher risk of breast cancer by comparison.

Veganism’s ethical contradictions, while comparatively lesser evils to industrial animal farming, are also problematic and therefore go unaddressed in You Are What You Eat: creating new-market monopolies that sell inaccessibly expensive foods with traditionally cheap ingredients ($28/lb for fake salami, cheeze at double the price of its dairy counterpart, a $365 tasting menu), enabling dangerous and unfair labor conditions that compromise the health of vulnerable fieldworkers, depleting water resources through irrigation waste, pesticide pollution, and erasing indigenous carnivorous diets all undercut the social ideals behind plant-based food activism.

Between world wars and a national depression, America created an industrialized process to produce cheap, calorie-rich food–then it became a cruel, chemical-soaked monster. But following the logic behind You Are What You Eat, the plant-based food industry aims to change a broken animal farming system by following the same broken approach to agribusiness: highly mechanized, technology-dependent, extensively processed, and revenue-driven. As physician and author Michael Greger says of Big Beef, “It’s just how the system works: not necessarily in the best interests of health but in the best interests of those who are profiting off the system.”

You Are What You Eat offers a tantalizing nutrition experiment that becomes science-adjacent window dressing to validate the documentary’s broader theme: veganism über alles. This might have been an interesting show that explores relevant issues like livestock antibiotics, farming subsidies, lab-grown meat, processed junk food, exercise, moderation, food safety, fieldworker rights, reducing food waste, and sustainability. Instead, we have to listen to a chorus of plant-based marketeers and other interests dominating the dinner conversation.