"[techno music playing]" "[Michal Siewierski] Our planet faces a lot of problems." "But in some parts of the world people live in a time of over-consumption and an eagerness to be fit and healthy." "The supermarket is overflowing with options." "we are poorly advised in nutrition and easily vulnerable to misinformation inaccurate health promises and colorful tempting packages are cluttering our relationship with food and risking our well-being." "We are bombarded by conflicting information diets and supplements." "So how can we know what's best for us?" "and which ones can potentially promote disease?" "I have struggled with these questions for a long time." "And it has been a challenge to find a diet that would help me achieve my health goals." "After trying several new diets over the years" "I decided to change my lifestyle by simply incorporating lots of plant-based foods into my diet." "it has worked for me." "brought my blood pressure blood sugar and cholesterol under control felt really good." "But it was a work in progress and I still had many questions and concerns about nutrition and living this plant-based lifestyle especially now with a recent" "I felt that I really needed to find answers." "So I decided to go on a journey and to uncover many of the myths surrounding food." "I traveled across the country and interviewed the world's top authorities as well as people that had experienced life changing benefits through healthy eating." "All to explore the idea of what is the healthiest and most sustainable diet for ourselves and our planet." "So join me on this journey of shocking discoveries because what you're about to learn might forever change the way you look at the food on your plate." "there's a lot of difference of opinion and there's a faction of people who insist that there are different diets for different people." "But I think that the evidence is fairly clear that and there really is an appropriate diet for humans dogs and any other mammal." "And the best diet for humans is one that is plant-based almost all calories coming from four principle whole grains and legumes." "high in fiber." "none is great" "I don't know how realistic that is." "many years... is a lot of confusion." "you know and ask them what do they think that nutrition is and you can hear all kinds of comments." "and I eat that and this is not good." "There's also confusion in the professions." "medical doctors are not trained in this field." "And there's confusion in my own field." "about medical research." "you know the way it should be told." "Because we're overwhelmed with the corporate sector trying to sell stuff." "We are living in extreme times." "Where we have 27% of people dying of heart disease 10% of stroke four or five percent from diabetes the same number for Alzheimer's." "many cases diseases of nutritional ignorance and diseases that are all based on our lifestyle choices." "There are a lot of different dietary theories out there but I think one fact is kind of indisputable." "Having a diet that is rich in whole plant-based foods is truly a great way to get you to good health." "Everywhere I go around the world there's not a single person I've met that doesn't know that fruits and vegetables are good for them." "We all know it." "it's about the doing." "There was a time when there was no heart disease." "no multiple sclerosis no inflammatory arthritis." "the Middle East and around the world people have become rich." "They have given up much of their starch and they replaced it with meat and dairy." "the royalty the queens and the kings the priestesses the people that could afford to eat the meat." "they had obesity they were sick." "Nothing's changed except for the number of kings and queens living in the world." "[Michal] A question kept coming to my mind." "If plant foods are so good for us and the consumption of animal products in excess appears to do us harm how about the ancient populations of people eggs and dairy and appeared to be healthy?" "aren't we known for being hunter-gatherers?" "successful populations of people have gotten the bulk of their calories potatoes breads and so on." "when you live near the equator as you move north and south in latitude then you end up eating more animal foods." "like for example they are largely carnivores because that's what's available." "But that's a small population of people that exists on the extremes of the environment." "not the rule." "[Joe Cross] We have become the most successful species on this planet." "No one comes close to us." "and microbes but we're number one." "And the way we got to number one was all about survival." "because fruits and vegetables are colorful." "Our hand is perfectly designed to pick and feed ourselves beans and seeds food made by mother nature." "This idea that we're hunter-gatherers we're hunter-gatherers." "we've been gatherers." "One of the problems has to do with sexism." "It has to do with the fact that the gatherers and children." "and they got the glory." "The people who really provided the bulk for most of the civilizations through all verifiable human history children and grandparents." "[Michal] Even when I began considering the idea of eating mostly a plant-based diet" "I was still hounded with many questions." "How was I going to be able to live without animal foods?" "I didn't want to become nutrient deficient." "calcium and omega 3's?" "I always associated these nutrients with animal foods." "I needed to find out if those were valid concerns or simply myths." "It's almost impossible to design a protein deficient diet a variety of whole plant foods." "What people need to know is there's never been a case of protein deficiency ever described in the world literature on any natural diet that met the sufficient amount of calories." "back to 1839 when protein was discovered it had this incredible reverence and it just gained traction." "But the evidence is very clear that humans do not need to eat a lot of protein they get a lot of health problems as a result." "I mean human protein needs are just a tiny percentage three percent of calories." "And if you were to eat the lowest protein foods in the plant world which would be foods like rice you're at eight or nine percent protein." "So you're not going to become protein deficient the promoters of the low-carb diets the promoters of the sports drinks and all these kinds of things insist and market to the public that they absolutely must have more protein." "It's just not true." "and in reality the way we humans operate we get ideal loads of protein if we just get it from plants." "When we consume animal foods if you will we're displacing the consumption of those foods that matter." "And foods that matter are plants." "The amount of animal protein we eat is the problem." "and Japanese populations and healthier places in the world people eat a little bit of animal protein very tiny." "They use one little piece of meat and it seasons a dish for eight people." "we have one gargantuan we put it on a plate with a tiny little bit of vegetables we call that a meal." "The problem is that when you eat too much protein you stress your kidneys and when it's animal protein you increase your risk of cancer." "And we see cancer is geographically distributed." "The more animal food consumed in a society you get." "all the animals that we choose in this country to eat for protein and calcium are vegetarian animals." "Where's the logic in that?" "also when you're eating your garbage and my calcium?" "It's only when you come into the healthy world that all of a sudden you're concerned with where it's coming from." "We're in the midst of this amazing protein push." "the message is clear." "protein." "This idea that you need massive amounts of protein to simply breathe air in and out of your lungs and to be healthy or to perform as an athlete." "Prior to making this dietary change like my main nutritional strategy in a day was to see how many grams of protein like about that the only calculations I ever really did" "I didn't count anything was just like trying to get in exorbitant amounts of grams of protein in my day." "Just because there are grams of protein on the nutritional content of something doesn't mean that your body can actually process all of those grams." "Protein does some other things." "It elevates blood cholesterol levels which most people have not heard of." "that idea." "And then repeated several times but always ignored." "Animal protein starts heart disease." "It increases things like the production of so called free radicals which are those highly reactive molecules that actually stimulate aging... and encourages cancer formation." "It also stimulates the production of the wrong kind of hormones." "It tends to increase the level of estrogens which in turn is associated with breast cancer." "It changes the microflora in our intestine when we're consuming too much protein." "it does all these things." "There's lots of things we have to worry about in the American diet." "97% of Americans don't reach the daily minimum intake of fiber 98% of Americans don't reach the daily minimum for example." "The nutrients of concern for most Americans are the ones that are found in plant foods." "Mostly fruits and vegetables and the ones that we're getting too much of sodium are found in processed foods and animal foods in general." "[Michal] Many people decide they want to improve by staying away from red meat." "they begin consuming more white meats and fish." "I always wondered if certain types of meats were really better than others." "People think that they're going to be healthy by giving up red meat eating poultry and fish." "Stop and think about this for a minute." "poultry and fish?" "They're muscles of animals." "they have to move a limb they flap a wing they wiggle a tail." "They're the same." "high protein no dietary fiber so heavily polluted." "From the standpoint of the effect of the protein it really doesn't matter." "not type dependent." "in many cases than chicken and pork." "too." "you have this whole hierarchy that eat things." "And so you concentrate all the pollutants in the ocean in fish like tuna that are some of the favorite that we like to eat." "So fish is really not healthier." "Don't kid yourself in thinking that if you're eating fish and chicken you can eat more of it." "Because one thing in common with these healthy populations around the world that do eat a little bit of animal food whatever type they're choosing tiny percentage of what they're eating in their diet." "So fish doesn't get a free pass." "A lot of people are being told to eat fish or to take fish oil." "That's the other thing." "By cardiologists who say that if you do that you'll increase your HDL cholesterol and here's the problem with that-- by the way." "It just doesn't make any difference." "Studies are pretty clear that in populations with total cholesterol and HDL cholesterol very low." "So that's the wrong reason to eat fish is to increase your HDL cholesterol." "Work on getting all of your cholesterol low." "I always heard that milk was a very important food." "And I consumed a lot of it." "I also loved all kinds of dairy products yogurts" "I had it all." "It took me many years to begin realizing that perhaps that was not such a great idea." "But I still wondered." "How about calcium?" "Would I be able to get enough of it from plants?" "we have a lot of calcium in dairy." "But it's never been a problem to have too low calcium in a diet." "An orange has a 110 milligrams of calcium." "so if you're trying to take in 1500 milligrams that doesn't sound like so much but when you're only trying to get 500 it sounds pretty good as a percentage of your daily intake." "for calves." "For baby cows." "literally." "we're the only species that drinks milk and then the only species that drinks milk after weaning into adulthood." "for example." "what is milk?" "Milk is a cocktail of growth hormones to get a little bovine animal who's susceptible to predation out on the African Savannah put on a few hundred pounds because they don't want to get eaten by a lion." "And so it's engineered as this growth food which is great if you're a little but if you're an adult person... that extra growth hormones is not a good thing." "one of the hardest things for people and they're sometimes so one of the things I tell why don't you look at the evidence and then decide." "Because I've always said taking control of your health is not doing what I say instead of what other taking control of your health is looking at the information and making a conscious about what you want to do." "Dairy products I describe as liquid meat." "They're basically just like red meat." "no fiber they may be worse than meat." "The casein that they use to bind the cheese is so full of chemicals." "The chemicals are as addictive as heroin that we don't have four stomachs like a baby calf it is in everything." "I know you have other names for it cheese." "But it's really breast milk from a cow." "The only reason people think we need extra calcium is because two decades ago they raised the bar on how much calcium we needed." "That in turn was influenced by the dairy industry." "We're not drinking enough milk." "Because that's what the dairy industry wants us to say." "if you look at the relationship between how much calcium that people consume as it relates to the bone disease the higher the calcium intake the higher the risk of osteoporosis." "No one wants to hear that." "But that's what the datas show." "[announcer] What goes on inside an egg during incubation?" "the eye shows up clearly as the first external organ to develop." "Gestation is much further advanced at ten days." "The chick's outline is more pronounced as other organs begin to form." "you can see the shape of the chick." "The contents of the egg provide nourishment during the incubation period." "[Michal] Most people can't imagine starting their day without eggs." "It's the favorite breakfast option around the world." "And eggs make their way everywhere and even drinks." "Eggs have played an important role in our foraging ancestors in creation and survival." "eggs are regarded as a healthy food minerals and fats." "are eggs really a good food choice?" "I was shocked to discover the mounting amount of scientific evidence showing that eggs and especially commercial eggs might not be the healthy food that we all once thought it to be." "Eggs are the most concentrated source of dietary cholesterol in the average person's diet." "And dietary cholesterol can lead to an increase which is the leading risk factor for our number one killer heart disease." "Eggs have kind of the same issue as dairy because commercial eggs are from chickens that are commercially raised if you ever knew how they were raised you would never go near it once." "but aside from the disgustingness of it to keep them to be specific." "They are fed feed that's usually corn and soy corn roundup ready soy." "So those are effecting again the bacteria and the microbiome of the chicken because you're ingesting it it's bio-accumulative." "A commercial chicken egg is mostly omega 6 so it's a horrible polyunsaturated profile... the least of the problems." "you've got the residue and pesticides." "[Michal] The next nutrients on my list were omega 3 fatty acids." "Who hasn't heard about fish oil capsules?" "And their supposedly great health benefits." "There seems to be a lot of controversy on this topic." "I was curious to find out how much of these fats and how would someone get them if they didn't eat fish." "A lot of these silly dietary fads become an industry." "making products and that sort of thing and I'm convinced that's the omega 3 thing." "so here's the deal." "There are two essential fatty acids." "Omega 3's and 6's." "your body synthesizes essential means must come from food." "so we find omega 3 fatty acids flax seeds all right." "And then we find omega 6 fatty acids pork and polyunsaturated vegetable oils." "And so you can see what our problem is we eat a lot of omega 6 fatty acids." "And in fact the ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 and one to four." "You know what it is today?" "and one to 30." "So this has led a lot of people to say this is so out of whack." "and omega 3 is down here." "Maybe what we ought to do is take fish oil pills and encourage fish eating to get that omega 3 back up to that ratio that we have been accustomed to as a population." "there's no evidence that it works in fact a large meta-analysis that looked at 89 studies showed that it didn't make any difference but besides that wouldn't it be better to lower the omega 6 stop eating all those" "stop consuming all that plant oil and the ratio goes back to normal." "So let's not supplement with omega 3 and we end up where we need to be." "There's no money in the decreasing omega 6." "There's a lot of money in selling people omega 3 pills and getting them to eat fish." "when you take a supplement omega 3's we've got some really good evidence now." "Summarizing a lot of studies." "the higher is the risk for type II diabetes." "too." "It does exactly the opposite of what people think it does." "It's disgusting." "It's one of those ridiculous things." "there was data suggesting but now the preponderance of evidence is that so there's this billion dollar industry that's basically selling people fish oil as snake oil." "eating a diet rich in meat is seen as a reflection of their manhood and associated with being strong and manly." "I felt the same way for most of my life." "So I was really surprised to come across studies that showed that such a diet might actually have the contrary effect in the long run." "right?" "It has the opposite effect." "That's not being very macho to have erectile dysfunction." "they even say it and Viagra commercials." "if your arteries are clogged and bacon and all this bullshit what's the main vein?" "man." "It's unquestionable that men think that they have to eat a lot of protein and that eating a plant-based diet may not be really masculine." "But I'll tell you what's really not masculine is erectile dysfunction." "if you want to have eat a plant-based diet." "There is a great deal of evidence that erectile dysfunction is caused by diet in many instances." "that if you have coronary artery disease you have it everywhere." "So those very tiny blood vessels are some of the first and so erectile dysfunction has been referred to as the canary in the coal mine." "It's the sign that something is terribly wrong and at that stage it's much more fixable than if you've already or the stroke or something really serious happen." "[Michal] Obesity is linked to more than 60 chronic diseases and it is common knowledge that there is an epidemic of obesity around the world." "and nearly one third of children in America struggle with it." "It seems like in the last 30 years human waist lines have simply grown out of proportion." "And if obesity rates stay consistent 51% of the American population could potentially be obese." "or losing weight people take two approaches that don't work for the long term." "of course they say diets don't work." "and be hungry all the time." "typical diets that people follow." "They don't work because you're hungry all the time you can't tolerate that kind of pain." "The alternative is the make yourself sick diets." "high fat low carbohydrate diets." "[Michal] Over the last few decades there has been an explosion of commercial diets in the U.S." "Most of them revolving around the idea and lots of animal protein helps with weight loss all orchestrated by multi-million dollar ingenious advertising campaigns and celebrity endorsements." "most people associate carbs with weight gain." "I worked really hard to cut my carbs and without fully understanding why I was doing it." "I wanted to find out what the latest science had to say about these low carb diets." "in 1973 published his first book in which he argued that it's not the problem it's not the problem with the protein he said that's not the problem the problem is we consume too much carbohydrate." "he said." "And then many other people wrote the same thing." "is only a copycat of the Atkins diet." "different name." "The Blood type diet in many regards is also a copycat." "same thing." "Omnivore's dilemma." "And the Paleo diet in this day and time is a copycat." "They may give it different names different types they're all wrong." "Everybody wants to hear good news about their bad habits." "So when you tell people you can eat all you can have steak some include dairy but that's sounds good because it sounds less restrictive." "I should tell you who don't have experience in this field period." "Most of them have never even published a single paper into scientific literature." "Some of the people who are talking about low carb diets are little better than and that's not to take anything away but they cannot" "Don't have the skills to evaluate scientific information." "they make you sick." "your whole body gets sick and kidney damage liver damage and so on." "that's been shown over and over again in major studies." "But they also make you sick in a way that you lose your appetite." "I've finally found it." "you lost your appetite you're able to sustain yourself without thinking about food all the time." "Because you're sick." "These diets are dangerous and people should not be on them." "the biggest lies in the world are the ones that have a little truth." "We all know that." "It's a great tactic." "that we should cut down on simple carbohydrates." "that's out of context to the whole." "white flour." "That makes sense." "there's a little truth." "But they don't always point that out." "low carb." "forget about what you like and dislike think about what your objective is." "let's just acknowledge we all like eating junk food." "I'll have some but that doesn't lead to health." "[Michal] I personally knew several people who experienced amazing healing and health benefits after adopting including myself." "I had also met others who are still experiencing health issues or were struggling with their weight some for many years." "So it made me wonder..." "Was there a flaw in this diet?" "First vegetarian that I knew well was actually a vegan." "He was a very strict vegetarian he lived on Coca Cola and potato chips." "and unhealthy." "So being a vegetarian means really nothing to me." "90% of the vegetarians are still consuming dairy." "90%." "sometimes some fish and so forth." "The nutrient composition of the vegetarian diet is not very different from the non-vegetarian." "if you compare the health of vegetarians you can't expect to see very much." "But somebody's decided they're going to be vegan in other words eat no animal foods they've made a declaration as to their physical and mental strength and their willingness to work hard." "if you become vegan you have to stand up to your mother-in-law you have to even though that's not true." "But the problem is that too many vegans they don't look good." "they're unhealthy looking." "I don't really like to use the words vegan and vegetarian because... that's not describing the kind of science I'm talking about." "I would call myself a fat vegan when I first started out and I was trying to tell everyone how great this and it reversed my heart disease." "about 75 pounds to a hundred pounds overweight." "Now why is somebody a fat vegan?" "Not because they give up the animal foods." "you need to give up the animal foods." "But what they haven't given up is the oil." "the other vegetable oils or an animal." "I made the change." "I removed the foods in my diet that were the fats the processed foods the food additives that kept me coming back for more those companies add those things purposely to get us to not eat just one potato chip." "We need the whole bag." "There's millions of overweight people in this country trying this diet and they try this diet for a week and they're spending a lot of money on all these different diet programs and adding things or to get healthy" "and that's where we need to realize that a whole foods there's no shakes there's no powders and stop." "And that's it." "[Michal] As much as I liked the idea of eating exclusively a plant-based diet especially since it had worked for me" "I wanted this film to be very accurate with the latest science on food." "if realistically from a scientific perspective could every person in this day and age eat a plant-based diet 100% of the time?" "that everybody has to be 100%." "all the time." "for the vast majority of people we ought to be at least 90 we've got good science for that." "it's a good idea they should be 100% all the time." "So that's my scientific argument." "on this question concerning how far do you go." "And that is that if we're going to adopt this dietary lifestyle... it's really important that we become accustomed to it." "and stay there." "And don't tease ourselves with the other things." "we never become accustomed to this where our taste preferences change." "there are no health issues." "the side effects are you're going to lose weight you're going to have more energy most of the time and a better life." "that's about what happens when you do this." "So there isn't a downside." "[Michal] We often hear that the key to good health and it makes sense." "But why then does it not seem to work for most people?" "that's a really easy thing to do." "But unfortunately for most finding moderation is like finding a needle in a haystack." "because others can do it and they feel like an absolute failure because they can't." "most people so they're actually in the majority and not the minority." "But this minority few that are on television ever been sick have genetics very much on their way and all about that." "how are they going to relate to that poor person sitting at home that feels like their world is over?" "I know what they feel like." "I was 310 pounds." "I was loaded up on medication for eight years." "I can relate." "I won't tell anybody that moderation's easy." "Moderation's damn hard." "Really hard." "I still haven't mastered it." "I'm a work in progress when it comes to moderation but what I'm finding is that I'm away from an extreme now of 93% of my energy coming from this processed animal fat" "I've now got this moderation up and it's working." "[Michal] So how are people supposed to get all this information?" "Since everyday we're bombarded with TV ads news talking about the new food trends." "How can we know who's telling the truth and has honest and unbiased science behind their products?" "The media always approaches things with the idea that if we're going to interview somebody we have to let somebody with a different opinion give their opinion." "so here's what happens." "at Cornell University" "The China Study." "It has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of references right?" "And so they're going to interview him well then they go find somebody that's promoting a Paleo diet or a low carb diet because we have to have the contrary opinion." "That person may have written a terrible book that's a little more than a storybook." "it has no credibility" "Colin has an opinion and this other person has an opinion." "and it gains traction that way." "[Michal] We tend to look at the fast food industry responsible for all the havoc surrounding food choices." "But these same companies that are contributing to the problem may also hold the key to the solution." "It is a supply and demand issue." "So if enough people begin demanding healthy perhaps that could be a good approach." "it is us the consumers who should dictate what the market has to offer and not the other way around." "healthier products by incorporating more plant-based foods and not to shy away from that." "I don't take a negative approach like down with these fast foods." "We need to make them understand that they can still make money and they can still have a sustainable business because there are people out there that want this food." "We just have to make it available to them." "[Michal] Most people rely on their doctors for information about diet and nutrition." "But several medical school programs show that doctors get very little training on nutrition." "none at all." "As I went through medical school and I started working on my own as a physician" "I became kind of a little bit frustrated really help people." "Because what I thought was happening" "I was just basically seeing patients asked to see them very quickly and was really left with limited options as far as what I could do." "I really felt what I needed to do with the time was just basically instead of trying to get to the root cause or the root cause of their disease." "it left me basically practicing I think the kind of medicine that the majority of people are which is pharmaceutical based medicine and I don't have a problem with medication." "medications are great they're necessary for a lot of people they are really the only option." "For many people they're a good option." "But I think what we're missing is that there's something else that's out there." "I was outsourcing my health to somebody else." ""Here's some money" "I'm busy over here." "cure me?" "By using more chemicals to correct we're actually causing the imbalances to be even stronger." "I found that people who've been on medications are developing a lot of side effects where then are causing other organs in their bodies to become diseased their overall health is weakening their immune system is getting deficient." "You really need to infuse that with something that's going to help rebuild it." "if somebody comes along and says" "I can take this patient you know changing their diet getting them to eat a little bit differently getting them to exercise do you realize that I could make virtually go away?" "And a lot of doctors in this country some may be familiar with the idea even to this day" "I don't think that would be possible." "The cause of most of our diseases and the cure is within anybody's reach who gets the knowledge." "is they have to make some change." "That's a small problem." "there is no money in doing the right thing." "There's money in selling you statins and powerful arthritis drugs that's where the money is." "So that's where the education goes." "from expensive procedures and shift it more towards education." "showing them about their disease and teaching them the things that they can do day in and day out that would positively impact that disease and possibly even get it certainly improved and maybe even reversed in some cases." "and the symptoms to go away." "if it's really to be cured 100% of the time with diet change and associated weight loss." "You can expect the arthritis' to improve many times with your inflammatory arthritis'." "all the way from indigestion to colitus you can expect to cure when you direct your attention to the cause of the problem and you fix it." "[Michal] On the supplement aisle is where things get really crazy." "It seems like every product can improve our health in one way or another." "Some support each of our different organs stimulate our immune system or promote weight loss." "It makes me really confused." "should we even have to worry about eating healthy?" "[announcer reading]" "Try Rybutol!" "need extra amounts of thiamine new energy." "Let just one person among thousands of users tell you about amazing benefits gained from Rybutol." "There's some products out there that could be beneficial to our health and there's nothing wrong with them but I think the problem comes when people overdo or overuse that one product the silver bullet." "The thing that's going to cure all my ills." "When people go to that extreme" "I don't think there's a product out there like that." "for most people." "And part of the problem with supplements procedures they all have application for specific populations." "if you will is based on the idea that you can't get enough nutrients you don't eat the right diet" ""make up" for it by taking these dietary supplements." "So it's become a 40 billion dollar industry." "people are doing it." "They're buying this stuff." "they're hanging on for dear life and they're not about to give into the scientific truth." "But the reality is that all of the nutrients that you need are in food and they're in food in very specific and complex combinations that we don't really even understand all of yet." "And so when you extract a single nutrient and purify it and put it in a pill you're overloading your system with something and is really not adapted to deal with." "Much better to eat smaller amounts of it" "I'll grant that there are exceptions" "I recommend supplements sometimes but not to the general population." "too." "We want to take everything and sell it to everybody 'cause that's how you make money." "many people trying to offer a magic pill or a magic this or a solution in five days that's going to change your life." "is that you can't do 20 years of damage by ignoring mother nature's best the seeds." "You can't spend 20 years saying no to that and then expect people in white coats in five days." "So what we have to do is we have to see the error of our ways which was turning our back on mother nature and we have to turn towards her for a solution." "Vitamin supplements for example like that it looks sort of interesting." "Maybe they're looking good for a little while no." "they don't work and yet we're spending 32 billion dollars a year on nutrient supplements." "The most important supplement for those eating plant-based diets a regular reliable source it doesn't have to be supplements but they have B12 fortified foods." "it's critical for everyone eating a plant-based diet to get a regular reliable source of vitamin B12." "There's only two vitamins not created by plants." "created by animals such as yourself when you walk out into the sun not made by plants not made by animals either." "It's made by little microbes it might've gotten enough from drinking out of a mountain stream or well water but now we chlorinate the water supply to kill off you know that's a good thing." "modern world got to get B12 from somewhere." "bugs during feces but I prefer a more sanitary route which is one 2500 microgram supplement once a week." "Costs less than five bucks a year or vitamin B12 fortified foods everyday." "[Michal] We spend more money on healthcare than any other country in the world." "Yet we have some of the highest rates of chronic disease on the planet." "it seems that some health insurance providers are beginning to embrace the concept of disease prevention through diet." "Instead of spending millions of dollars trying to simply manage the problem when it might already be too late." "So Medicare now accepts for reimbursement for reversing heart disease as well as the Pritikin Program." "it's not only cheaper but actually more effective than kind of the traditional approach and a lifetime of drugs." "And so-- from a whole-- the most important things is reducing suffering and saving lives but from kind of a fiscal responsibility-- so much more cost effective and who's footing the bill?" "it's the taxpayer so they're saving money by making people healthier." "it is hard to imagine that anybody could perform well as an athlete without consuming any animal products." "Not to mention being a world-class athlete or even a world champion." "I am a professional triathlete specializing in the Iron Man Distance." "I'm also the Ultraman World Champion." "I have been racing for triathlon professionally" "I've finished 66 Iron Man Races and I love to train and race all the time." "I'm an ultra-endurance athlete." "Most people have heard of an Iron Man." "an Iron Man is a very long triathlon over the course of a one day period you ride your bike 112 miles and then you run a marathon." "While Ultra Man is essentially double that distance" "I was the fastest American and 6th place overall in this race." "I do believe that last season on a plant-based diet was my strongest." "than I've ever been." "that were among the top five best performances in my career and I was able to win the Ultra Man World Championship." "What you're also seeing are athletes like MMA fighters they're realizing performance gains they're recovering more quickly in between their workouts." "NHL players all kinds of athletes who are starting to experiment and explore this way and getting good results." "I've been doing this for over eight years right now" "I've never had a problem building lean muscle mass." "fitter and faster and it's fine." "the proof is in the pudding." "I know that I am like stronger than I've ever been without animal products to myself and I've hopefully proved to other people that it can be done." "[D Anthony Evans] I'm a neurofibromatosis patient" "I'm an ambassador for a couple of organizations that do philanthropic work for sick children." "I'm an NPST cancer survivor." "NPST is a rare sarcoma." "It's one of the most aggressive and fast infiltrating cancers that there is on the planet." "I've had over 325 tumors removed from my body." "very rigorous and painful battling for my life... and I had a decision to make." "I'm either going to let this take me... or I'm going to fight." "Like giving up wasn't an option." "I don't know what's going to happen but I'm not going to die sitting down" "I'm going to keep my hands up and I'm not going to stop swinging until it's over." "I would not be here today." "It kind of kept my cancer at bay and it's allowed me to thrive in ways I didn't know was possible." "The insane mindset that... animal protein is the key to being very healthy almost killed me." "I'm not saying plant-based diets cure be-all but what I am saying is that if you're going through some type of health crisis very much greater when you embrace a plant-based lifestyle." "Those are just the facts." "And my life is the living proof." "I attempted suicide whilst I was on 250 milligrams of Zoloft for what the doctors diagnosed as major depressive disorder." "And I was told I'd be most likely on it for the rest of my life." "A week after that I went into a personal development course and changed my beliefs." "I started to look at what I was putting into my body." "And I started to look at nutrition and what I could do." "And it led me to going within and back to nature." "I stripped away all of the processed food." "I went back to just eating raw fruits and green smoothies and I started to have a sense of a natural" "Natural happy high started to come into my body and I was feeling better than I'd felt in many years." "The symptoms of depression started to drop away." "tired feelings the chronic fatigue everything started to shift." "And I started to feel my cells were transforming on some level." "I'd made the decision that I didn't want to put the fear of death and suffering and eating animals into my body." "And that translated to" "I cured my own depression." "And I've never looked back." "[Michal] Eating tasty food is one of the biggest pleasures in life." "So many people might argue that even though eating an unhealthy diet is not good for them they don't want to jeopardize the fun aspect of it." "they continue eating unhealthy things." "But one thing that I came to discover is that when you transition into a healthier you do not have to compromise on taste." "you will go through a transition period and your body's chemistry you will start to crave and really enjoy these foods." "It is important to find food you like and once you realize that almost every dish you will see that it is not that hard at all." "There's such a stigma with the word vegan" "I guess that people just get automatically turned off and just assume that it's going to suck." "But it's like it doesn't." "that was another because it's better." "I think food's just way better this way." "I would say just try it." "you'll surprise yourself." "When you're becoming vegetarian and you've given up the meat and the dairy the only thing you know for food you think you're going to starve to death." "You have to understand that and lasagna and hash-brown potatoes that's where you get your calories and your protein and your vitamins and your minerals." "wonderful delicious plant-based foods out there." "when I started to do this a whole world and when you begin to eat these nutrient dense foods that are actually that are actually nourishing you with all of these amazing vital nutrients you start to feel good and your taste buds change." "suddenly you're not thinking about that anymore and you're actually craving that kale smoothie." "And that's something that happened to me that I would have never thought would have happened." "People think that vegan food just tastes like crap." "And that's not true." "I think that people think that being vegan might potentially be strange that you have to be a hippie or you have to embrace wearing hemp clothes or something." "you can have a burger." "You want to have spaghetti and meatballs you can have spaghetti and wheatballs." "you want to have chocolate mousse you want to have pumpkin pie you want to have-- even hot dogs." "And so when you're looking at the idea of taking the leap into this way of eating and living don't look at what you're going to be embrace and be excited about the adventure of all these new foods" "that you're going to be bringing into your life." "[Michal] Eating healthy will not do you much good if you can't afford it." "Or if it leaves a big hole in your pocket." "is it possible to eat healthy on a tight budget?" "A common misconception is that a whole foods plant-based diet is very expensive." "I routinely post pictures of my grocery receipt and I take my whole bounty that I bought and put it out on the table so people can see how much I end up with and they're shocked." "Whole grains that we buy in bulk are very inexpensive." "You're going to cut your grocery bills in half from a typical standard American diet." "it might seem like a lot of effort you're saving all this money for all the new clothes you're going to have to buy for the new slim you that is produced from eating this whole foods plant-based diet." "It's easy to go into those markets and say" "There's no way that I can do this." "But the truth of the matter is that it doesn't have to be expensive it doesn't have to be inconvenient it doesn't have to be time consuming." "And my experience is that it has actually and it's been cheaper than eating the other way around." "[Michal] At this point of my journey" "I already had seen enough evidence about the benefits and safety of a plant-based diet for adults but was this lifestyle also ideal and safe for children?" "Not only can children grow healthy they'll grow healthiest on a plant-based diet." "we have an epidemic of childhood obesity and children raised plant-based actually grow taller by about an inch." "They grow about an inch taller than meat eating incumbents right?" "They don't have the same problems so Dr. Benjamin Spock the most esteemed pediatrician of all time wrote one of the bestselling books recommended in his final edition of the 7th edition of his book before he died in his 90's" "that all children should be raised with zero exposure to meat and dairy." "And he did this because he saw what the older generations were dying from and wanted to get them off on a good start." "the leading killers of our children same thing." "COPD hypertension." "These are diseases that can be prevented or even reversed with a healthy enough plant-based diet." "I wondered how could I get my daughter to eat healthy?" "Since getting her to eat anything at all can sometimes be a problem." "There's so much junk being marketed and it is often difficult for parents to transition their children to healthier food options." "I would not be surprised at all 25 years time people will look back at the last 10 to 20 years" "How did those people give that food o their children?" "A big question that we get all the time is" "How can I get my kids to eat better?" "I think every parent wants their kids to eat healthy especially when everywhere you look or a processed food snack that is being marketed towards children." "And the first thing that I always say is" "You have to lead by example." "you can't be eating lousy foods and expect your children to eat healthy because you tell them to." "that's number one." "I encourage all parents to make the preparation of meals and the shopping of food inclusive with their children." "The more you can bring your kids into the fold the more they're going to develop an emotional attachment to where their food comes from and the impact that it's having on their health." "Really get inside their heads and sort of think how they would think." "what is bad you have to interact with them you have to show them what's possible." "get the kids to help you and let them own what they're doing." "If you always put something in front of them and let them consume it'll only work for so long." "is you've got to get them involved let them have the responsibility." "The way I approach it is that I try to make it use flavors teach a little thing that they never knew about normal people won't see but I want them to go away with a feeling and something that" "they're eager to share to their friends." "Hopefully their parents." "I think that's the best part." "It's like holding a bird." "You don't want to hold it too tight you're going to hurt the bird." "or it's going to fly away." "That's something that each individual parent has a specific knowledge of their kid." "I get the questions all the time." "how do I start they're going to be so disappointed that they're not having that they're not having dairy." "it's basically the same thing you just leave the meat out." "because why?" "You're going to put that burger on that bun you're going to put all the fixings on that you make it exactly the same that's a great way to get started." "When I think with the younger generation is that they get to start young" "I'm not going to have any regrets but it sort of bums me out a little bit that" "I'm just now discovering this in my 30's because" "I wish I would have done this when I was younger because just the thoughts of like the energy that I would've had in college." "I think the other thing is to not have... with your children." "you have to eat this." "respect them as independent sentient beings the wherewithal to make conscious decisions for themselves." "we serve plant-based foods we don't have any animal products here but when my 10 year old daughter goes to a birthday party you know and birthday cake and all of that" ""You can't eat those foods." "Have a great time at the birthday party and make the right choice for you." "And that doesn't mean that she always makes the right choice." "That way you are empowering them." "This is a lifetime we're talking about." "so it's about getting your children to think consciously about their so that when they reach the age they are informed and educated and prepared to be responsible stewards of the planet and responsible stewards of their own bodies." "[Michal] I could not make a film about food choices versus non-organic." "It seems that everybody's obsessed and it's becoming increasingly adverse to foods that don't carry an organic label." "Others fear that consuming more plant-based foods might be damaging to their health due to the increase of pesticides in those foods." "But should this really be our biggest concern?" "Fear of pesticides should never keep anyone from maximizing their fruit and vegetable intake." "so there's been like chemic computer so for example if half of Americans ate a single more serving we'd prevent" "000 cancer deaths every year." "just one more serving 000 people would not have died from cancer would normally have died if they hadn't done that." "So that's how powerful fruits and vegetables are." "because these were conventional pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables they estimated that it would-- That the extra pesticide burden from all those extra fruits and vegetables would cause 10 extra cancer deaths." "990 cancer deaths." "But that's what we're looking at a year this tremendous benefit." "Then a tiny bump in risk." "choose organic whenever you can why not get all benefit?" "but we should never let concern about pesticides in any way dissuade us from stuffing our face with as many healthy fruits and vegetables as possible." "and you're eating commercial meat and you're worried about switching to plant-based diet and worried about the pesticides in the produce because you're getting a fraction of the pesticides by eating the vegetable that you can mostly wash it off." "you can wash" "You can soak your vegetables and use a wash to get pesticide residue off." "You cannot wash the pesticide off of the hamburger meat you're about to prepare." "I encourage people just to go ahead and buy whatever produce they can afford whatever produce looks the freshest and whatever's on sale so that's where they're going to save money is not worrying about" "I have to buy organic bell peppers and they cost me four dollars each." "That's not a sustainable lifestyle." "[Michal] Besides the health aspect related" "I also realized during the production that there was another very important factor or misunderstood." "The connection between food choices and the environment." "I was really shocked after reading the United Nations report on global warming." "it is hard to grasp the idea or steak on our plates water scarcity the destruction of the Amazon forest and even world hunger." "I had a hard time understanding it at first but once I began digging a little deeper... the connection became clear." "it's seven billion people determines how the whole planet is used as we run out of land to grow these animals and the food we burn down rain forests to acquire more land." "And the number one cause of all of that is our food choices." "It's expected to have a 40% shortage in fresh water supplies by the year 2030." "irreversible loss of biodiversity and extinction of species faster than for the past 65 million years." "We have a world hunger issue with a little less than a billion people on earth suffering from hunger with about 350 children dying from hunger each hour." "[Michal] You might be asking yourself how is all that possible?" "And I had the same questions many of these issues are not only related to our food choices." "Many are very complex problems and cultural variables." "But here are some intriguing facts." "70% of our arable land is used to grow crops for animals and not humans." "It takes on average 2400 gallons of water and 12 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef." "Five million acres of rainforest are destroyed so companies can graze animals and grow food for these animals." "The excrements of 80 billion land animals killed every year for food are not treated and go back into our water basins creating a lot of pollution." "And these are just a few examples." "So when you consider these facts... it all begins to fall into place." "the complete ecological environmental depleting footprint is of that item is versus just how close it is to you." "Or whether it's even organic or not." "It's much less of a footprint to eat something that was grown 1500 miles away than it is to eat that was an animal product by your next door neighbor." "across all sectors our food choice specifically as it relates to eating animals." "or eco-friendly the truth is that by nature we are a very destructive species." "Almost everything we do has a negative impact on the environment." "So many people often try to minimize their footprint by doing things like switching to more effective taking short showers using solar energy or even buying an electric car." "And those are all great things." "But the question is are these actions in fact the easiest and most effective when it comes to helping protect our planet and its resources?" "You look at the four major problems." "We've got overpopulation net." "and the way we consume stuff all that stuff is coming from finite resources which we are steadily depleting." "the overpopulation are driving the third one which is our dependence on fossil fuels." "Look at the numbers." "the line for consumption of fossil fuels have gone steadily up every year and there's no end in sight." "of all of these particularly global warming is our consumption and that keeps going up." "10 times as much water and 10 times as much energy." "And it ranges." "and that's a big number." "any individual overnight." "what would happen if everybody changed at once?" "that's not going to happen." "those first three items over consumption each one of those would if not centuries to fix." "[Michal] With more and more people embracing the idea of reducing their intake of animal products or adopting some kind of a plant-based diet it seems that things are moving in the right direction." "really?" ""Things are getting better." "we see people putting solar panels up and there's vegan restaurants things are getting better." "not really." "And not even close." "that's moving in the direction of a plant-based diet there's a hundred people moving in the other direction." "We've got to double our food production to feed the nine billion that we'll have by 2050." "[Michal] When it comes to global warming the production of animals for food currently contributes to about 14.5% of the total global warming effect." "A contribution larger than the entire global transportation sector combined." "Livestock amounts to 53% of nitrous oxide emissions 44% of methane gas and 5% of the total carbon dioxide released in our atmosphere." "Raising livestock and eating fish and also producing dairy is one of the largest contributing factors to climate change." "And the public needs to know this and policies need to be enacted to help eliminate that." "It's one of the easiest ways that we have but to mitigate climate change." "And it can be done as easy as just changing out what you have on your plate." "[Michal] Organic grass-fed beef seems to be the new trend." "And the idea sounds really appealing." "Cows that live off grass don't take any antibiotics and therefore supposedly provide a healthier when compared to factory farmed animals." "But is there a catch?" "It's a very large movement today and I think that what's happening is that there's been a shift because of more and more people being concerned about the humane and moving away from factory farms they're moving toward grass-fed operations" "or pasture fed operations." "It's a complete fabrication by the meat and dairy industries to continue perpetuating because even though some animal might be humane raised they're still not humane killed and all of the animals that are still placed on your plate have to be slaughtered" "and so there's still but from an environmental standpoint raising grass-fed beef is less sustainable than factory-fed animals because it's so land intensive." "It may require eight pounds of feed to produce if it were beef it's 10 times that much" "80 times from a grass fed to a grain fed beef." "from a climate change standpoint grass-fed cattle produce 40 to 60% meaning methane land use changes than a grain-fed cow would." "[Michal] Another thing often taken for granted is the depletion of our oceans." "We often think of fish as a never ending self replenishing food source but the truth seems to be quite different." "Over 90% of all the big fish in the oceans are already gone." "or depleted." "The fishing fleets are chasing the last of the fish." "And have to travel further and further away from the land and deeper and deeper into the ocean to catch them." "I've seen illegal fishing in Antarctica and that's as far away from land as you can get." "When someone sits down at a table to eat fish or seafood on their plate... what they're really doing is they're eating a target fish that's becoming depleted to the point but they're also eating" "and typically it requires about five to twenty times more other seafood and by-kill is the term that relates to all those other sea life living in the ocean that are killed in the process of trying to get that target fish to your plate" "whether it's with purse seine type of fishing method or middle trawling our oceans are expected to be completely devoid of all fish that we recognize commercially today by the year 2048." "and nobody wants to know about it." "we die." "It's as simple as that." "And if you start destroying them you're basically killing out the crew and the life support systems going to collapse and there won't be any air to breathe and there won't be any food to eat and the climate'll be out of control" "not a good thing." "But we have to humble ourselves and recognize we need these creatures and if we don't see that then our chances of survival are quite slim." "My big concern is not that we're going to wipe out of sheer ecological stupidity but that we're going to take so much with us." "and so much debate." "That it just boggles my mind that we can't and say" "Why not just address the number one cause here?" "we got ten holes in the boat which hole do we go first?" "Go to the big hole." "Fill that big hole first." "so often we're looking at just what we would like to eat because it satisfies our taste preferences." "we're at a point in time in order to save humanity." "Essentially which is not an overstatement at all we need to start looking outside of self and start looking at how our choices are fully effecting those around us those species that we share this planet with and especially future generations." "I saw a documentary called "Earthlings that exposed the conditions in which farm animals are slaughtered." "It made a big impact on me." "I knew that animals got killed for food but seeing how it actually happened pain and terror that these animals go through put things into a new perspective for me." "I was already eating mostly plant-based foods but after seeing those images" "I decided I could not contribute to the killing of innocent animals any longer." "So I became a 100% plant eater." "I was not in a position to judge anybody." "I ate animals for over 30 years of my life." "how come in this day and age such a massive genocide was allowed?" "the general population government and corporations allowed for this to happen?" "and eat others because we have been born into a invisible belief system that conditions us to compartmentalize when it comes to animals." "It conditions us to think of certain animals as edible and other animals as inedible." "And the invisible belief system that conditions us is what I call carnism." "One way carnism remains invisible is by remaining unnamed." "so we can't question it." "obviously it becomes much easier to maintain this mythology that there is no problem there is no atrocity." "[announcer] This is not just something to eat." "This is beautiful love action." "This is life." "You're think they're just animals?" "They have intelligence." "They have language signal." "They have love." "So when they are about to face deaths in a death chamber and they anger." "everybody talks about the Holocaust what about the Holocaust we're creating for the animals?" "we're killing billions and billions and you want peace on earth?" "Peace on earth is for all living entities not just humans." "People just got locked up in Utah a concentrated animal feeding operation." "These people keeping the people ignorant to make money." "if people know where their food came from or where or how their food was produced they wouldn't eat that shit." "When you start to threaten the dominant you're going to become and they'll do everything they can to destroy you." "that's happening now." "There are still people who'll see that" "I was one of those people" "I grew up in Texas and I loved animals." "I always loved the companion animals I grew up with" "I thought I was eating healthy." "So I think a lot of the resistance that people feel is because we're so conditioned to eat these things we've been conditioned from a very young age." "And even if we make the intellectual connection" "I'm eating a cow." "We still don't make the emotional connection we would feel the empathy that would cause us to feel disgusted rather than appetized." "I couldn't pretend anymore eating that chunk of chicken breast was the same as the broccoli next to it." "I couldn't-- I couldn't fake it to myself anymore." "you know and feed lots are not located in densely populated areas." "it's because people don't want us to see it." "Then those animals go on a long journey usually." "and that's by design." "and killed?" "in our part of the world and lambs are to be eaten they eat dogs and in some parts of the world they eat snakes and monkeys." "it's true that people have eaten animals but today for many people in the world there's absolutely no need to eat animals." "as human beings massive suffering to other sentient beings suffering that is completely unnecessary." "When eating animals is no longer a necessity then it becomes a choice." "And choices always stem from beliefs." "[Michal] There is a popular myth that perpetuates the idea that fish don't feel any pain." "That makes it easier for people to consume it since it seems to be more humane." "is it really true?" "they have feelings and so there are a number of researchers that would tell you very clearly you're slaughtering between one and three trillion fish per year and all of those fish have sensory reception they all have feelings." "The industries depend on keeping these facts out of our consciousness." "we learn to resist taking in information from those who may help us begin to question carnism." "If you shoot the messenger you don't have to take seriously the implications of their message." "So we need to educate our children the true meaning of what these animals and by awareness about life of the pig or chicken is very much same as life of cat and dog." "[Michal] Our time on this planet is very short." "and slow." "But by taking the right steps we can point ourselves into a better direction." "this was the most exciting journey I ever took." "And I look forward to continue living plant-based lifestyle with my family." "And to keep empowering others with this information." "It's so important for us to take care of ourselves for our own human health standpoint but it really won't matter how healthy we are if our planet isn't healthy." "You know what's unique about us?" "We are the only species out of the millions... that does not live in harmony with nature." "At least it's good to educate yourself and then you can make the decision from there you know." "you're the worse person if you don't do this." "but at least educate yourself so at least you just know." "you can make the choices on your own." "I don't believe there's an evil cabal of doctors and government people" "I believe there's a system in place and the world is so asleep intuitively that people just follow the system without questioning and it's because they're asleep." "it's not because they're not motivated." "it's really insanity when you think about it." "in the modern day and we've got to talk about eating fruits and vegetables." "you go back in any time in history and it was just like everyone was doing it." "If you want to be a responsible steward of our precious planet and its dwindling resources eating a plant-based diet really is the only solution." "and eating a plant-based diet you are saying no to animal agriculture all the havoc that it's wreaking on our planet." "I think that every human being wants to do good." "I think that every human being wants to do what's right." "And I think that if we look at it" "You know what?" "What is it that I can do today to make my health better and to have compassion for animals for our fellow creatures." "What is it that I can do today?" "I can start on the path to a plant-based diet."