01 May 2018 Debunking ‘What the Health’, the buzzy new documentary that espouses a vegan world
There’s a sensational documentary out on Netflix that seems to have a lot of people talking about going vegan. But it completely mischaracterises what we know about food and disease.
In the spirit of so many food documentaries and diet books that have come before, What the Health promises us there is one healthy way to eat. And it involves cutting all animal products from our diet.
Meat, fish, poultry, and dairy are fattening us up, giving us cancer and Type-2 diabetes, and poisoning us with toxins, Kip Andersen, the film’s co-director and star, tells us.
Reflecting on a youth spent inhaling hot dogs and cold cuts, he asks, “Was this like I had essentially been smoking my whole childhood?”
No, Kip, not really.
To be sure, Andersen and co-director Keegan Kuhn’s intention was to explain the link between diet and disease and help Americans make healthier food choices. And there’s no doubt we are in the midst of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease epidemics driven in part by the kinds of food we eat in the quantities in which we eat them.
But Andersen’s film fails on several accounts, and cranks the food fear sirens to irresponsibly high levels. He mischaracterises and overstates what we know about how particular foods drive disease, by offering a narrow view of the science with cherry-picked studies to support his views.
He also seeks out a slew of vegan and animal rights–friendly health professionals rather than a more balanced roster of experts, and engages in silly gotcha journalism to suggest organisations like the American Diabetes Association intentionally hide the truth about diet.
Most of us could stand to eat more fruits and vegetables and less meat and dairy, and a plant-based diet is a healthy choice for many people. But with messages like “drinking milk causes cancer” or “eating eggs is as bad as smoking cigarettes,” this film isn’t going to right our health problems.
It confuses what’s known in science and obscures the truths of nutrition that could actually help us live healthier lives.
What the Health cherry-picks and misreports studies to make the case for veganism
What the Health is part of a genre of food documentaries (and diet books) that selectively analyse nutrition research to demonise particular foods and praise a particular diet.
In this case, Andersen cherry-picks studies about nutrition and often exaggerates their findings or reports them out of context, to drive home his case for veganism. Let’s run through a few examples:
1) Eating processed meats is as bad for you as smoking.
In a gross distortion of the WHO’s 2015 review of the link between processed meat and cancer, Andersen claims WHO sees bacon as a food on par with cigarettes and asbestos when it comes to causing cancer, and that eating a daily serving of the stuff increases your colorectal cancer risk by 18 percent.
Eating processed meat — including hot dogs, bacon, and lunchmeats — does increase the risk of colorectal cancer, according to a WHO review of the available research, but the health effects are not nearly as large as Andersen suggests.
A person’s lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5 percent, and eating processed meat every day appears to boost a person’s absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, to 6 percent (that’s 18 percent of the 5 percent lifetime risk).
So enjoying the odd strip of bacon or salami sandwich isn’t going to change your lifetime cancer risk, but eating the stuff every single day could increase your risk of this one particular cancer by a single percentage point.
What’s more, the WHO did not say that eating meat was as deadly as smoking. Rather, it determined that the strength of the evidence linking processed meats to colorectal cancer is similar to the strength of the evidence linking tobacco and cancer, meaning there’s convincing data here.
This certainly doesn’t mean that eating processed meat is as bad for you as smoking. It means that according to the agency’s assessment, the links between processed meat and certain types of cancer are well-established.
So when the filmmaker asks, “If processed meats are labelled the same as cigarettes, how is it even legal for kids to be eating this way?” he clearly didn’t understand the WHO’s read of the research. (To be fair, a lot of other media outlets got the WHO warning wrong too.)
2) Eating an egg a day is as bad as smoking five cigarettes.
This claim that equates eating eggs with one of the most dangerous health behaviours known to humankind is absurd and reflects an out-of-date understanding of cholesterol’s role in health. Two in three long-term smokers will die because of their habit. The same just isn’t true for egg eaters.
While the nutrient has gotten negative attention from the media for decades, the scientific community has moved on since evidence has piled up showing that eating more cholesterol isn’t necessarily associated with higher levels in the blood or an increased risk of heart disease.
That’s why a national nutrition committee recently declassified cholesterol as a “nutrient of concern” in the American diet…..