Forks Next to Knives and even a Spoon

I recently ditched Dish Network for an Apple TV. When I started exploring my new Netflix account I found a ton of documentaries. I am a geek so I was excited about many of the documentaries. I was intrigued about all of the food documentaries. Food, Inc. Fast Food Nation, lots of them that I had never heard of. I watched a few of them and I find this a very interesting phenomenon. Some of the documentaries seem pretty scientific on the surface.

Forks Over Knives follows a pair of doctors who have researched the benefits of plant-based diets for the last couple of decades. They had some really intriguing info about the health benefits of a plant-based diet. They never referred to this diet as vegan which made me a little curious. I was most interested in a population study that tracked cardiac disease in Norway during World War II. The Nazis took away all of the livestock early in the war and they showed a graph that showed an almost immediate reduction in heart disease shortly afterward. It also showed heart disease returning to original levels after the war, when we can assume the livestock were reintroduced. I wanted to learn more about this and found an interesting blog post that went through some of the claims in the documentary. For instance, why did they fail to mention fish as part of the Norwegian diet. Surely they ate even more fish once their livestock were taken away. Why did they fail to mention fish as a staple of the Japanese diet. Why did they use rural Chinese diets, which include some meat, as proof that meat should be completely removed from our diet. Continue reading →