You are What You Eat: Propaganda Masquerading as Science

I’m a bit late to this party, the party being the one where people document their reactions to Netflix’s latest offering in the food/diet space, You are What You Eat, released on January 1st 2024. Others dropped their verdicts within a few days of the release. The truth is that it took me some time to muster up the fortitude to watch the series. I anticipated that I might find it biased, manipulative, misleading and comically short on real science (Spoiler alert: I wasn’t wrong), and I had no real desire to clutter my brain and ruin the first weeks of January by watching it. But people kept asking me if I’d seen it and what I thought about it, so I had to bite the bullet. I watched the four episodes in two sittings, notebook in hand, and ended up with 36 pages of notes on the various segments, which I categorised in the margins as I went along, roughly as follows:

1.Yup, I broadly agree with that point/fact/bit of data, though not necessarily with the conclusion reached on the back of it

2.Where’s the evidence for this? I’ve not seen it

3.The evidence definitely does not support this, or, in some cases, this is a bald-faced lie.

4. Huh?! This is just a crazy idea/experiment/statement. Are they mad?

 You may or may not be surprised to learn that the margins of my notebook were cluttered mostly with 2s, 3s, and 4s.

 I perused the internet to see what the general view was. A quick scan of the feedback on IMDb (130 reviews and an overall rating of 5.9/10 when I checked on 11th January) suggested that most people are critical of the series. Typical reviews are titled ‘biased, one-sided garbage’ and ‘vegan propaganda’; positive reviews are few and far between. The Mirror reported that ‘Netflix fans threaten to ‘cancel subscription’ over ‘mind-boggling’ twin documentary’. One online reviewer criticised the propaganda, cherry picked data, and product placement and promotion for vegan companies, in addition to the poor design of the original study and the fact that the show’s ‘all or nothing mindset creates hurdles that are unsustainable”.[1] Another called the series ‘ extremely biased’ and said that ‘it spent the majority of the time talking about how great being vegan is for you and did not critically look at both diets.’[2] Yet another review by a vegetarian called it ‘just another in a long line of Netflix’s alleged documentaries wrapped in a glossy package’[3] with ‘bad storytelling and argument’.

 I found a few positive takes on the series, such as one in the Irish Times titled ‘If this show doesn’t turn you vegan nothing will.’ [4] (My money’s on the ‘nothing will’.) And The Sun found some viewers who were convinced.[5] One said ‘You Are What You Eat on Netflix was mind-bogglingly good. Like actually making me want to consider going fully vegan.’ Another wrote “It’s making me rethink my whole life’ but added that they were grateful to have found a local farm from which to buy meat, so apparently the ‘whole-life’ change didn’t include going vegan.

Those who criticised the series on the grounds that it did not spend enough time looking at the Stanford study on which it is based (‘Cardiometabolic Effects of Omnivorous vs Vegan Diets in Identical Twins: A randomised clinical trial’ by Landry et al, the ‘et al’ including Christopher Gardner, a prominent vegan researcher based at Stanford University) might be surprised to learn that the study itself was no great shakes either.

Stanford’s Twin Study: Science or PR Stunt?

The Twin study was a trial involving 22 pairs of twins, the objective of which was to ‘compare the effects of a healthy vegan vs healthy omnivorous diet on cardiometabolic measures during an 8-week intervention’.  [6]

 Nina Teicholz, author of the bestselling Big Fat Surprise, wrote about the trial in a substack post (Unsettled Science) titled ‘Stanford’s Twin Study: Science or PR Stunt?’. Teicholz pointed out the following:

That the study’s lead author was Christopher Garner, who has been ‘mostly vegan’ for 40 plus years and now directs the Stanford Plant-Based Diet Initiative (PBDI), launched in 2021 with a 5 year grant from Beyond Meat.

That Gardner’s course at Stanford, Food and Society does not cover health at all, but focuses on ‘animal rights and welfare, environment and climate change, human labour abuses in slaughter houses and restaurants’ and the PBDI is founded on the ‘assumption that the plant-based diet is superior to any alternatives’.

That the study was funded by the Vogt Foundation, founded by Kyle Vogt (dubbed a member of the “vegan mafia” in Silicon Valley), which donates exclusively in support of animal rights, animal rescue or veganism and also gave almost a million dollars to Game Changers and over half a million to the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), the founder of which is Louie Psihoyos, Director of You Are What You Eat.

What these facts suggest is that the Twin study was not really a study undertaken in order to answer a genuine question about whether a vegan or omnivore diet is best for health, but a study designed explicitly to make the case for veganism.

How might a study be designed to reach such a forgone conclusion? As Teicholz explains, it’s mainly down to the criteria selected, and the way the results are interpreted. The main criteria used to evaluate the two diets (‘healthy’ omnivore and ‘heathy’ vegan) was its impact on LDL cholesterol. (LDL-C), named as the study’s primary outcome measure. At the end of the 8-week experiment, LDL-C was 13.9mg/dL lower, on average, for the twins on the vegan diet. Teicholz says that this is not surprising because plant-based diets generally lower cholesterol by replacing some of the body’s natural cholesterol with plant sterols in cell walls. ‘By focusing exclusively on LDL-C, he [Gardner] is assured of garnering the winning headline: “Twin research indicates that a vegan diet improves cardiovascular health”, as the Stanford press release read.’

But what about other important measures of cardiovascular or indeed general health? Healthily high HDL- cholesterol, usually dubbed the ‘good’ cholesterol, is very important, and this went down by 3.6 mg/dL for the vegan twins in the study, although this result did not quite reach statistical significance. (The authors avoided discussing this in the paper). On another of the criteria highlighted, fasting insulin, the vegan twins came out ahead, with better fasting insulin levels and greater weight loss. Teicholz asks whether this was down to the vegan diet, per say, or might be explained by the fact that the vegan twins ate less sugar and some 180 fewer calories per day. The study’s authors acknowledge the confounding impact of the reduced calorie intake in their discussion of the study’s limitations, stating that ‘the biological mechanisms cannot be determined to be causally from solely the vegan diet alone because of confounding variables (weight loss, decrease in caloric intake, and increase in vegetable intake)’. 

Teicholz highlights the fact that the vegans consumed 64% less vitamin B12 over the course of the study and report an (insignificant) drop in B12 levels. This is glossed over in the discussion section of the paper, with the authors writing that ‘serum B12 levels were not statistically different than omnivores at 8 weeks, likely because of preserved stores’. Longer term adherence to the vegan diet would, of course, have depleted those preserved stores and led to worse health outcomes for the vegan twins, unless they were advised to supplement as, say the authors in a backside covering statement, they are ‘typically encouraged’ to do.

As for the many other nutrients which are absent from or in short supply in a vegan diet, (Teicholz lists long chain omega-3 fatty acids (EPA/DHA), vitamin A, various B vitamins, vitamin K2, calcium, vitamin D, iron, zinc, iodine, and choline) these are not mentioned in the main paper. The authors do not, therefore, have to explain how the health of the vegan twins might have suffered had the study duration been longer than 8 weeks.

Stanford’s Twin Study: ‘a waste of much time, effort and money’.

Dr Zoe Harcombe also did an in-depth analysis of the Twin study[7], concluding that ‘it was a waste of much time, effort and money’, ‘didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know’ and ‘adds to the body of literature claiming that plant-based diets are better than omnivore diets’ when, in fact, ‘nutritionally the opposite is true.’ Dr Harcombe’s criticisms of the study were consistent with those expressed by Teicholz:

The main outcome of interest, LDL-C, did fall in the vegan group, but this could be explained by the increase intake of plant sterols.

The vegan twins consumed an average of 345 calories fewer than at baseline and nearly 200 fewer than the omnivore group, and this calorie deficit was maintained during the self-delivery phase. Both the reported weight loss and lower fasting insulin levels in the vegan group ‘could easily be explained by the calorie (and protein) inequalities introduced in the trial’.

The paper claimed that B12 intake did not suffer, but it was noticeably higher in those assigned to the vegan group at baseline and vitamin B12 intake did not drop to zero during the trial (as it would if participants were not eating any animal foods), ‘indicating that fortified foods were being consumed’. ‘That’s cheating’, says Harcombe.

Many nutrients were missing from the list of those reported on during the trial. The longer-term impact of deficiencies in essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, and vitamins and minerals in the form that the body wants them could not be ascertained during an 8-week trial.

Regarding the study limitations noted by the authors, the last one (‘that changes to LDL-C cannot be separated from weight loss observed in the study’) is perhaps most significant, or ‘last but not least’, to quote Harcombe. 

The Stanford Twin Study: badly designed, or designed for a purpose?

Like Teicholz and Harcombe, I found the study to be badly designed on several levels. It was too short, too imprecise about food consumption, selected a primary outcome (LDL-C) which research has shown to be a poor predictor of cardiovascular health and outcomes, and failed to measure the intake of many nutrients that are essential to long term health.

Wanting to better understand why there had not been greater control over food provision/consumption, I wrote to Christopher Gardner to ask him why meals had not been delivered for the full 8 weeks. In his prompt reply he said that they focused on ‘efficacy for the first 4 weeks, effectiveness for the last 4 weeks’. He explained efficiency as follows:

First four weeks delivered meant much quicker and more complete adherence..and made it easier for study participants  to know in the last four weeks of the study what kinds of things to purchase and prepare…

He did not define effectiveness. But it seems to me that a reasonable definition would be how well the intervention fulfils the goal it sets out to fulfil, which in this case is defined as ‘to compare the effects of a healthy vegan vs healthy omnivore diet on cardiometric measures during an 8-week intervention’. It also seems to me that effectiveness would have been better served by delivering set meals to the participants for the full duration of the study. After all, it was not the objective of the study to establish how well participants had understood the parameters of their prescribed diet and how skilled they were at shopping and cooking in line with those parameters.

Delivering meals to participants for the full 8 weeks might not have completely equalised calorie intake. (Gardner explained that the calorie count of the vegan and omnivore meals delivered was equal, and that it was consumption patterns that drove the calorie deficit for the vegans). But it might have reduced the calorie gap (particularly if combined with strong guidance to consume all the food provided), while also allowing researchers to take different levels of sugar consumption out of the equation.

Whatever outsiders might think about the study design, looking at it from the perspective of a team that might be seeking to make the case for veganism, it looks pretty much fit for purpose. The short duration and the selection of LDL-C as the main outcome enables the researchers to make the bold claim they want to make, which is that a vegan diet is cardioprotective, without addressing the longer-term nutrient deficiencies and other harms to health that might be caused by it. The fact that meals were only delivered for the first 4 weeks, and that participants were able to choose how much of it to eat, would enable any inconvenient results to be dismissed as being down to adherence or personal responsibility. Which, of course, is exactly what happened in episode four of the series.

 You are What You Eat: compounding the sins of a poor study

The failings of the study are compounded by the sins of the Netflix series.  Here’s my top line assessment of those sins:

The series compromises the scientific integrity of the source study by filming alongside it. It also overstates the rigour and integrity attributable to the fact of twins being studied. Moreover, it isn’t really about health and was likely never meant to be. It’s about making the case for veganism on ethical and environmental grounds, with a bit of health stuff thrown in, and giving free advertising to a host of commercial entities producing plant-based meat and dairy substitutes. It’s laughably short of evidence in the form of actual studies being cited, delivers pretty lacklustre results for the vegan diet, and makes many factually incorrect claims about the way different foods impact both nutrition and the environment. Because actual evidence is thin on the ground, Netflix throws in a couple of silly but entertaining experiments to bolster its case. Other tricks it deploys are repeatedly conflating omnivore diets with ultra-processed foods, spinning the arguments in favour of vegetable consumption into arguments for veganism, and shamelessly leveraging the longstanding (and unwarranted) bias against saturated fat for its own purposes. It also deploys its critique of industrial animal farming to damn all animal farming, downplaying the proven value and power of more animal and environmentally friendly systems.

That’s the short version. If you’re interested in the longer version, please stay with me for another twenty minutes or so.

Did filming compromise the scientific process?

Christopher Gardner confirmed to me that the series was being filmed all the while that that the study was being conducted (as opposed to the experiments being reconstructed for the series after the fact). Think about this for a moment. The trial participants know themselves to be participating in an experiment designed and funded by people who advocate for vegan diets. They know that everyone wants the vegan diet to perform better than the omnivore diet.  It’s hard to predict exactly how the known biases, and the presence of a film crew, might have affected each of the participants or the results of the various tests, but it’s a certainty that this situation is about as far as you can get from a gold standard Randomly Controlled Trial.

Overstating the value of studying twins

No doubt about it, the idea of studying twins in this way is novel and provides a great hook for the series. The twins themselves also make great TV. They’re charismatic, funny and entertaining.

But the scientific value of studying twins in this context is greatly exaggerated by a lot of people who should know better. For example, within the first few minutes of episode one, Professor Tim Spector tells us that because the trial involves identical twins, we can assume that they are pretty much the same at the outset. We have no evidence of this, however. Have the twins had different experiences throughout their lives? Have they eaten differently? Maintained different exercise habits? Been subjected to different amounts of stress? If so, they will be different at baseline, because of something called epigenetics (the way experiences alter gene expression). We know that they were different at baseline because the characteristics table in the source study makes this abundantly clear. For the record, the omnivores were heavier and had higher systolic blood pressure, higher HDL and LDL cholesterol and triglycerides at baseline. Those assigned to the vegan diet started out with higher levels of B12.[8]

Later, when we’re talking about the microbiome, a microbiome scientist tells us that the microbiome is impacted by diet. He also says that the twins have a similar microbiome. Huh? Do we know this to be the case? How can it be unless the twins have been eating exactly the same diet for all of their lives, right up until the moment of this study? Sorry Netflix, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t maintain that diet has a profound effect on the microbiome AND claim that middle aged twins who might have been eating different things all their lives are starting out with the same microbiome.

An ethical and environmental case for veganism, not an exploration of how diet impacts health.

The Twin Study itself actually gets very little airtime across the four episodes. My back of the envelope calculation is that the study is allocated no more than 25% of the 198 minutes of running time. And certainly, the big reveal of the results of the Twin Study is given 15 minutes, max.  The rest of the series is devoted to exposing the harms (to animal and planet) caused by industrial animal agriculture and showcasing the ultra-processed products of a handful of well-funded vegan food producers, as well as the $300 per head menu of a Michelin starred vegan restaurant.

I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised by this, given who funded the film, who directed it, and who did the original study. 

Free advertising for the plant-based sector

If the twin study doesn’t get all that much airtime in the series, the commercial entities representing the plant-based sector certainly do. We hear so much from Daniel Humm, owner and head chef of the newly vegan Michelin starred NY restaurant, 11 Madison Park, that I wondered if Netflix had taken a financial stake in the restaurant. Humm gets to talk about how he wanted the food at Madison Park to be as or more delicious as it was when it served meat. Well, it had better be, because he was planning to continue to charge high end prices, and still does. (Check out the vegan menus at www.elevenmadisonpark.com, which range from around $167 to over $300 per person. Without wine.)

Humm also talks about ‘showing the way’. But the way to what, exactly? To beautiful and (I’m taking his word for it) delicious but tiny and extortionately priced plates of food, each assembled by dozens of perfectionist chefs using tweezers? What normal person could ever produce food like that from vegan ingredients? And, more importantly, what’s the nutritional value of the food he serves? He doesn’t say. I also wondered if everyone who dines at the restaurant rushes home to fill themselves up with some decent protein. That’s just a hunch.

Extensive free promotion also goes to Miyoko’s Creamery (purveyor of plant-based cheeses), Plantega (a plant-based deli), Impossible Foods (you know this one), Prime Roots (plant-based meats) and Wicked Kitchen (more plant-based meats).

All of these companies sell food products that warrant the label ‘ultra-processed’. Wicked Kitchen’s Spiced Amazeballs, for instance, contain:

Vegetable shortening (palm oil, rice flour, sunflower oil)

Pea protein

Textured pea protein

A ‘crumb’ including cornstarch and dextrose

Methylcellulose

Caramelised sugar powder

Herbs and seasoning

That’s not just highly processed, but containing two types of sugar, a thickener/emulsifier and something that sounds suspiciously like a transfat.

The promotion of these kinds of ultra-processed foods in a series that is highly critical of ultra-processed foods is hypocritical in the extreme. Processed foods are very, very bad, unless they’re vegan processed foods, in which case they are very, very good. Oh, alright then.

The most glaring instance of this kind of logic is found in a segment featuring plant-based dairy innovator Miyoko Schinner telling us how she just had to work out how to get into the pizza game, followed by people chowing down on vegan pizzas at a pizza convention. The evil ultra-processed pizzas we’ve seen in earlier segments are thus transformed into health foods by virtue of being smothered in vegan cheese.

Laughably short on evidence

When the film, The Game Changers (also partly funded by the Vogt foundation) was released in 2019, the criticism from nutritionists and scientists poured forth. One of the critics was nutritionist Tim Rees, who penned a superb three-part critique, looking at all the studies showcased in the film to see whether they had been fairly represented (they hadn’t) or made an open and shut case for a plant-based diet (they didn’t). I was spared that torturous exercise, because there were not many studies showcased in You are What You Eat. There were plenty of vague references to studies or to ‘science’ but no actual studies. Except, of course, the single study on which the entire documentary was supposedly based, which, as we’ve discussed, had some pretty significant flaws at its core.

Lacklustre results for the vegan diet

In episode four of the series, we get the results we’ve been waiting for. How did the twins - or more importantly their diets - do?

First up: Michael (omnivore diet) and Charlie (vegan diet). Michael experienced minimal weight loss overall, but he lost 4lbs of fat and gained 2.5 lbs of muscle. Charlie lost more weight overall (3.5 lbs) but lost only 3lbs of fat and .5lbs of muscle.

This is not a good result for Team Vegan. But the various experts in the film don’t want to acknowledge this (obviously), so they explain the results away. One of their explanations is that the men had different exercise routines. This may have been partly true. If so, why was that allowed? Wasn’t this supposed to be a controlled trial? In fact, if the aim was to test the efficacy of different diets, why was exercise even part of the programme. It creates confounders on multiple levels.

Another explanation given is that Charlie, the vegan, just didn’t eat enough calories. Again, why was this allowed to happen? Why weren’t the twins given prepared meals for the full 8 weeks and encouraged to eat all that they’d been given?

Now to Wendy and Pam’s results. Wendy (omnivore) has lost 3 lbs, all of it muscle, and gained fat. Oops. Pam (vegan) has lost 8 lbs, but just 1lb of it fat, the remaining 7lbs being muscle. Big oops, particularly in the context of our expert, Amy Kutch-Stanbery’s earlier claim that ‘if you don’t have muscle, you’re not healthy.’ A question is asked: How closely did Wendy follow her prescribed diet? Questions that aren’t asked: how is it that another vegan twin has lost so much muscle? As before, if the aim was to test diets, why didn’t they do a better job of controlling the diets?

The conclusion reached is that both Pat and Wendy needed to eat more in order to fuel their workouts. Maybe so. If that’s the case, we haven’t learned very much about the efficacy and healthfulness of different diets, except that they must be ‘calorific enough’. Brilliant.

Carolyn (vegan) and Rosalyn (omnivore) are next. Carolyn has lost 5 lbs, 3 of them muscle. Rosalyn has lost all fat and maintained her muscle. There’s a pattern here. I hope you’re seeing it. Again, the result is explained away as being down to Carolyn’s lack of time in the gym. Then the experts reveal that when it comes to visceral fat, Carolyn has actually come out on top. She’s has lost half a pound, whereas Rosalyn has gained 2 lbs. The nutritionist says that this is perplexing. Not explained by the diet, then?

Again, we’ve learned very little about the impact of vegan vs omnivore diets, except that, thus far, the vegans seem to have lost more muscle mass. Someone, somewhere, should be asking whether this might be down to the quality of the protein in a vegan diet, and the fact that plant proteins have been shown to be inferior at encouraging protein synthesis.

No one asks that question, but our expert measurement taker, Kutch-Stanbery, says something very interesting en-route to revealing John and Jevon’s results. ‘I wanted to see someone gain lean mass on a vegan diet so I encouraged them to eat a lot more than they were eating previously.’

Hold on a bleeding second! Isn’t this supposed to have been a controlled, scientific experiment? Are we okay with one of the research team manipulating the inputs in order to generate positive outcomes for the vegan diet?

Kutch-Stanbery must have been delighted with John’s results after 8 weeks on a vegan diet. He lost visceral fat and gained two pounds of muscle. But Jevon (omnivore) gained seven pounds of muscle! The experts try to distract us from this stupendous result for Team Omnivore on the lean-mass- building front, one of them saying ‘if you hadn’t consumed more food that’s not the number that would have been in the paper’. First of all, what does this even mean? Second of all, how very unscientific, in a study that’s supposed to be rigorously scientific.

No doubt about it, this has been a s*** show. But the filmmakers and their experts make a brave attempt to rescue some definitive conclusions from the results. Yes, the omnivores gained more muscle, but all of the vegans lowered their visceral fat. Someone says that this just goes to show you that body composition can be altered in a matter of weeks via diet and exercise! Brilliant. And yes indeed. But if the alteration engendered by the vegan diet includes significant loss of lean muscle mass, can it really be claimed that this diet is best or even good for health?

If the body composition results didn’t exactly tell a positive story for the vegan diet, what of the other measures looked at in the series?: cognitive ability, LDL-C, TMAO, the microbiome, and the biological clock.

Cognitive ability: we’re told about ‘all the studies’ that show that eating more plants helps to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s (by up to 53% apparently). No evidence is presented. And anyway, if it exists, it’s an argument for eating some plants, not for eating only plants or even mostly plants. I wonder what the film makers and experts here would think of the excellent book called How to Feed Your Brain, by Maria Cross, which I’ve just read. Cross provides an immense amount of evidence that if you want to avoid Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and many other forms of mental illness, you need to make animal foods the centre of your diet because they provide all of the nutrients essential to neurological and brain health. Others such as Dr Georgia Ede, Dr Chris Palmer, Dr Paul Mason and Dr Ben Bikman have amassed similar evidence. So, before you swallow this guff about plant-based diets and cognitive ability, please do go and check out those sources.

Anyway, I don’t think you’re going to swallow the guff because the cognitive scores of the vegans and the omnivores in this study were no different. This is, once again, explained away as being due to the short duration of the study. My hypothesis is that with a much longer study duration, we would see a marked difference, with the omnivore diet proving to be the winner.

LDL-C: Here is the jewel in the You Are What You Eat crown. There have been significant decreases in the LDL-C for the vegans but not for the omnivores.  How impressed you are with this depends on whether or not you buy into the theory that LDL-C is the best or even an accurate measure of heart health. As I’ve said, I do not. There’s much evidence to support my belief. Some of it is highlighted in my own book, and much more of it analysed by Dr Malcolm Kendrick in his excellent books, The Great Cholesterol Con and The Clot Thickens, and by Dr Zoe Harcombe in her extensive writing on the subject, which includes an article titled ‘Rebutting the Cholesterol Hypothesis’[9]. Harcombe also did an analysis showing that there is an inverse association between average cholesterol levels and all-cause mortality for 181 countries.[10]

TMAO: this is a marker of inflammation. At the end of the study, the vegans TMAO levels had dropped by 350%, whereas the omnivores had risen by 160%. Sounds pretty dramatic, right? But let’s revisit the source study to see what the authors have to say about TMAO: ‘We were surprised that TMAO concentrations did not significantly differ between the diets at 8 weeks’. And yet, the film makers chose to report that TMAO levels had differed greatly. For the four sets of twins featured, maybe. (The authors of the study write that once outliers had been eliminated, the TMAO levels were, in fact, significantly different between the diet groups.)

We might ask why TMAO was even discussed in the series, given that non-significant results for HDL (lower in the vegan group) and fasting tryglicerides (higher in the vegan group), both of which reflect badly on the vegan diet, were ignored.

A final point about TMAO: The authors of the study also say that it is not known ‘whether TMAO is a bystander or mediator of disease.’  Probably best, then, to ignore any definitive claims made about it in the Netflix series.

Microbiome: Here we learn that the vegan twins ended up with more of a good bacteria called Bifidobacterium, which is helpful for preventing infection and a few other things. Fair enough. But this is an argument for eating a few more plants, not an argument for eating only plants.

Biological Clock: the length of some things called telomeres is here used as a proxy for biological age. The vegans experienced a lengthening of their telomeres, but the omnivores did not. Someone says that ‘this suggests that a vegan diet can slow the clock’. But the segment is so rushed, and so lacking in independent evidence about the science surrounding TMAO,  that we can’t really evaluate this claim. I put it to you that the film makers don’t have much confidence in the telomere theory. Which is probably why telomeres are not even mentioned in the body of the source study 

This is all pretty unconvincing. Which may be why the film makers have to call on Tim Spector to reassure us that the results are, in fact, convincing, and ‘consistent with the idea that plant-based diets lead to longer life’. No evidence is presented here, but I suspect that Spector is loosely referring to the reams of epidemiology that associates plant-based diets with longer life. Epidemiology is notoriously unreliable for establishing cause and effect with any certainty, but if that’s what underlies Spector’s bold assertion, that I’ve a bit of epidemiology to lob back at him: a 2022 study of 175 contemporary populations published in the International Journal of General Medicine which found that higher meat intake is associated with greater life expectancy.   

Some stonkingly inaccurate environmental claims

Misleading claims about the impact of diet on the environment abound in this series. Quite early on in episode one, Dr Michael Gregor, a well know advocate for meat free diets, says that ‘what we put in our mouths is more important than anything else’. For what? For fixing climate change? It’s not entirely clear, but if it is climate change that he means, he’s misleading us, because, in America (which seems to be the place they are talking about), the emissions from all livestock (3.9%) and even agriculture as a whole (11%) are completely dwarfed by those from transport, energy, and industry.[11]And it’s been demonstrated that your personal carbon footprint would be reduced more significantly if you gave up a single transatlantic flight or stopped driving your car. Eating a 4oz steak from a cow raised on pasture three times a week for a year generates fewer emissions than a single transatlantic flight.

Sometimes, the inaccurate environmental claims are embedded, not in what someone says, but in the imagery used. For example, in episode two, Pat Brown (Founder of Impossible Foods) talks about catastrophic increases in global temperatures, just as a shot of some dairy-cows flashes onto the screen. The implication is that the key driver of climate change is not industry or transport or fossil fuel use in general, but livestock farming. 

Then there’s Monbiot (who, in case you haven’t heard, wants to eliminate all farming and replace it with fake food created in labs via the precision fermentation method), who says (in episode two) that the livestock sector produces more emissions (31%) than all of transport (14%). George pulls this number, 31 percent, out of some hat he’s got hidden under his desk, where it should have stayed because it’s completely and utterly false. Globally, the livestock sector produces 14.5% of emissions, vs 14% from transport. In the US, the numbers are very different, with livestock producing 4% of emissions and transport producing 28%. But these are highly inconvenient facts that will remain unacknowledged by You Are What You Eat.  Even more inconveniently, if the numbers for livestock and transport were calculated using the same methods (counting direct emissions only), then livestock’s contribution (5%) would be much smaller than transport’s (14%).[12] Then there’s the fact that the IPCC has acknowledged that the current metric used to calculate emissions (GWP100) has overstated the warming impact of livestock by 3-4 times.[13]

Another outlandish claim is made by Tony Seba, a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur as well as author, speaker, thought leader and founder of RethinkX, who has, previously, predicted that demand for cow products would fall by 70% by 2030. Seba talks about how inefficient cows are, requiring 25lbs of feed to produce 1lb of food (giving a 25:1 feed to product ratio) in some parts of the world. I don’t know how the film makers came up with these numbers because they don’t tell us, and they certainly don’t reference any study. But a report by the FAO’s Anne Mottet states that livestock consume around 6 billion tonnes of feed, including 1/3 of global cereal crops, but 86% of this is currently inedible by humans. The same report confirms that 1kg of boneless meat from ruminant systems requires 2.8kg of human edible feed. That’s a 2.8:1 ratio of feed to product.[14]And should you be thinking that this ratio still indicates that cows are inefficient, remember that the meat produced from the grain has vastly more bioavailable nutrients and protein than the grain.

If the environmental data used to condemn livestock is suspect, so is that being used to pump up the environmental advantages of meat and dairy replacements. There’s a segment in episode three in which the cheese-loving twins (Michael and Charlie) are filmed tasting a vegan provolone. There follows a very long advertisement, sorry, fact-based discussion about the amazing cheese produced by Miyoko’s Creamery. It’s made with cashews, a supposedly environmentally friendly crop. Really? I thought it took 3070 litres of blue (irrigation) water to produce a kilo of cashews.[15] I wonder how Miyoko Schinner manages to make a pound of her cashew-based cheese with a mere .25 to 1 gallon (approximately .95 to 3.8 litres) of water? Also, given that milk has a blue water footprint of around 8 litres per litre[16], on what basis can Miyoko claim that a dairy cheese requires 800-1000 gallons (3000-3800 litres) of water per pound? Seems a bit of a stretch.

But the most gargantuan lie of the entire series is uttered by Pat Brown at the end of episode four. Brown says that if everyone gave up meat, this would offset all emissions from all other sources. The audacity of the man! He clearly isn’t aware of the 2018 study that showed that if everyone in America became vegan this would reduce overall emissions by just 2.6%[17], and this at a significant cost to nutrition. Nor, evidently, does he appreciate just how absurd his statement is in the context of global emissions from animal agriculture being 14.5% of the total (this being an artificially high number owing to the particular metrics used), leaving 85.5% attributable to other sectors.

A few more inaccurate claim, this time about about nutrition and health

How accurate is the series on the subject of nutrition? Well, the word nutrition isn’t mentioned very often. Instead, we mostly get vague statements about how plant-based meals and diets are ‘healthier’, with the criteria for ‘healthy’ left conveniently undefined.

Where the series does decide to get more specific about the impact of different foods on human health, it mostly gets it wrong.  

Quite early on in episode one, Dr Michael Gregor opens the floodgate to the torrent of misleading claims by asserting that dairy consumption is associated with Parkinson’s and prostate cancer. No mention of any of the evidence that suggests that dairy may be cardioprotective[18], or of a 2023 review which listed whole fat dairy amongst its list of ‘health protecting foods’.[19]

Marion Nestle next sticks her own esteemed boot into dairy, explaining how the dairy industry spent decades telling us that dairy is good for us. Trouble is that neither she nor anyone else provides any evidence that the dairy industry was lying, and that dairy isn’t, in fact, good for us.

Later, in episode two, Dr Gregor draws parallels between the evidence against smoking and the evidence against meat. This is a cheap but powerful shot, because everyone knows just how bad smoking is, don’t they? What Gregor doesn’t tell us is that the epidemiological evidence against smoking showed a 15-30x increase in the risk of getting or dying from lung cancer as a result of smoking; the so-called epidemiological evidence used to condemn meat generally shows increased risks in the region of 1.1 to 1.3. This is true of the 2015 WHO study (which we hear about next) which showed an increased risk of 1.18 from eating processed meat. As one member of the WHO’s investigative panel, Dr David Klurfeld, explained, small risk ratios like this cannot prove causation, and are likely just down to noise in the system. (This is the noise created by flawed study design, inaccurate food frequency questionnaires, multiple confounding variables and such like.) Anyone who wants to better understand the findings of the 2015 WHO study should check out Dr Georgia Ede’s excellent analysis at www.diagnosisdiet.com. [20] 

Later, in episode three, Public Health Nutritionist Tracye McQuirter misleads us about protein when talking about the ideal composition of a plate of food. Her recommended plate is half full of bean stew - for the protein. What she doesn’t tell you is that you’d have to treble that amount of bean stew to obtain an adequate amount of bioavailable protein, and then pair it with a big pile of rice to ensure that you’re getting all your EAAs. McQuirter opines about how ‘easy it is to make a food taste delicious’. No mention of how hard it might be to make it nutritious.

In episode four, plant-based meat producer, Chad Sarns, the Co-founder of Wicked Kitchen, tells us that mushrooms (the basis of his company’s meat replacements) are powerhouses., and that the Vitamin D in mushrooms is ‘incredible’. Quick fact check: 100g mushrooms contains 7IU of vitamin D (about 9% of your RDA). A single egg contains 43.5IU, and this is D3 which is infinitely more bioavailable than the D2 found in the most mushrooms.

Mushrooms are featured a bit later on when we meet Leah Garcés, CEO and President of Mercy for Animals. She pays a visit to a former industrial chicken farmer. They agree that both of them wanted a system that was better.  Nine years later, they’ve found it, and it consists of former chicken sheds filled with giant mushrooms. Now, the mushrooms in the chicken sheds are indeed things of beauty, and undoubtedly delicious. But do I need to point out that mushrooms play an entirely different role to chicken in the diet? Chicken provides 27g of complete, bioavailable protein per 100g. Mushrooms provide less than 3g of incomplete protein per 100g.[21] Chicken contains B12; mushrooms do not. So, Netflix, please don’t try to persuade us that we can swap chicken for mushrooms without some nutritional consequences.

The most egregious crime against nutrition is committed at the very end of the series. Right after Pat Brown drops a bombshell about how everyone needs to give up meat, Marion Nestle tells us that too many children are obese and sick and at risk of diabetes and high blood pressure. Nestle is not wrong, but the fact that her statement comes hot on the heels of Brown’s claim serves to establish a false link in viewers’ minds: eradicating meat from the diet will mean fewer sick, obese children at risk of diabetes and high blood pressure. In the context of the extensive evidence of harm to children caused by vegan diets, and the fact that even the notoriously anti-meat Eat Lancet says that its low meat Planetary Health Diet is not suitable for children, this is beyond irresponsible.

Silly experiments substituting for compelling evidence

Was it the fact that hard evidence in support of the vegan diet was so thin on the ground that prompted the film makers to throw in a couple of silly experiments (The Porn Test and the Kitchen Contamination Test)? Or was it the sheer entertainment value of these tests that they couldn’t resist? We can’t know for sure, but what we do know is that neither of these tests were part of the original Stanford study. They were add-ons for the sake of TV. And what good, albeit nonsensical TV they make too.

Episode two opens with the first of the experiments, The Porn Test. Two of the twins, Pam and Wendy, have to watch porn behind closed doors to see what effect it has on the temperature of their genitals. This ridiculous experiment harks back to the equally ridiculous erection experiment in The Gamechangers. That was men; this is women. Clearly, the plan is to prove that a vegan diet will improve sexual appetite and health for both men and women, so that, for a vegan couple, well, you know what they say about rabbits. As if enjoying porn and having hot genitals have anything at all to do with genuine sexual appetite or health.

In the final episode, Pam, Wendy, Rosalyn and Carolyn are gathered in a room to learn about what happened when they viewed porn after 8 weeks on their new diets. All the women experienced an increase (of between 221% and 383%) in the temperature of their genitals between the first test and the second test. But the two women on the vegan diet, Pam and Carolyn, experienced the biggest rise. Carolyn’s genitals constitute a veritable forest fire!  according to Irwin Goldstein, the excitable Physician who oversaw the experiment.

What are we to make of this experiment and these results? Should we really be getting excited about a relatively higher increase in genital temperature for two out of the four women studied? Is genital temperature really a good proxy for libido and sexual health? Did the researchers account for anything else that might have impacted libido, such as previous attitudes to, beliefs about and experience of sex? (If they did, they didn’t say.) Should we view this experiment as anything more than a bit of sensationalist TV? I’ll leave you to decide.

The other made-for-TV experiment is contained in the segment about the contaminants in chicken. We’re told that 1 in 25 packs of chicken tests positive for salmonella. ‘WHY IS THIS TOLERATED?’ someone exclaims. Then we witness a little experiment. Two of the twins (Carolyn and Rosalyn) prepare and cook some chicken in their kitchen, and the glow germ technique is used to highlight where the pathogens have been deposited. The answer is ‘everywhere’. It’s all over the women’s hands, the counter, the oven handles, the taps. Everyone is suitably horrified. Personally, I think they should be more horrified by just how careless and messy the women have been. It’s almost as though they were told to touch absolutely everything in the kitchen without washing their hands.

There’s another point to note about this little piece of drama. The chicken itself is found to have tested positive for e-coli. More hysteria ensues. What we’re not told is that the vast majority of pathogens like e-coli and salmonella are killed by the cooking process. And no one eats raw chicken.  Just like no one eats raw beans – which, by the way, will do you great harm if not properly soaked and cooked. And if we’re going to get our knickers in a twist about e coli in uncooked chicken, we’d better also start warning people about the oxalate overload they’re going to get if they consistently eat too much raw spinach, and the kidney stones and/or arthritic joints they might suffer from as a result.

Creating a false equivalence between the omnivore diet and ultra-processed foods

Early on in episode one, Christopher Gardner tells us the story of the Standard American Diet (SAD). We’re told that Americans have an obsession with protein, but the type of protein we’re shown being consumed is of the ultra-processed variety (UPF) – fast food, stuff in tins and boxes. Thus begins a trope that continues unabated throughout the series – meat, and other quality proteins are conflated with ultra-processed food. Talking heads move fluidly back and forth between the two terms, never being precise about what they mean, and thus successfully tarring whole food diets containing meat and other animal foods with the UPF brush.

Gardner is at it again, a few minutes later, in the segment about body fat testing. There’s some talk about how BMI is inaccurate, and Gardner tells us that visceral fat (fat around the organs) is the thing we should really be measuring. He says, ‘if you are consuming high amounts of animal products as well as processed foods then you’re getting trans and saturated fats which is going to increase your chances of storing visceral fat around organs which puts you ate risk for certain types of cardiovascular disease.’ (Italics mine). Take a moment to appreciate what Gardener is doing here. It’s that conflation of animal products with processed foods again, blaming the former for the sins of the latter. What about animal products as part of a healthy, whole food diet? He’s also conflating trans fats with saturated fats, which is disingenuous in the extreme. (More on the saturated fat issue in a moment). The former are exceedingly bad for us and indeed bans on their use exist in Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and certain US states and other countries have sought to limit use. Incidentally, trans fats are also derived from monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats, NOT saturated fats. Bundling them together and blaming the bundle for visceral fat is misleading in the extreme. 

The conflation of omnivore with ultra-processed continues in episode two, when the Mayor or New York, Eric Adams, is wheeled on to tell his story. He once had an ulcer and Type Two Diabetes, which was a threat to his eyesight. He googled “reversing diabetes’ and was led directly to Dr Gregor and the plant-based diet. Previously, he has also talked about cutting out processed foods (which, apart from being highly processed, tend to be carbohydrate rich). But we’re led to believe that it was the plant- based element of his new diet that cured him.  Plant-based is equated with whole food, and an absence of junk and processed food, and omnivore, by extension, is conflated with the ‘bad’ processed diet Adams once consumed.

Many of us have seen the reams of evidence that a low carb diet full of animal foods can also reverse diabetes (including this study[22]), and we might now be reading Gary Taube’s excellent new book, Rethinking Diabetes, in which he documents the fact that, of the studies assessed by  the American Diabetes Association for its 2019 review, ‘the low-carbohydrate or very low- carbohydrate, high-fat diets (aka keto) were the ones that had been tested most frequently in the past twenty years and the only ones that showed consistent benefits.’[23] (Italics mine). We know that if Adams had dug a little more deeply he might have found his way to a low carb route to health. But he didn’t, apparently. He saw ‘plant-based diet’ and decided this was the answer. (Then he set about pushing plant-based meals through New York’s schools and hospitals, thereby subjecting children and sick people to his ill-founded beliefs and the nutrient deficiency that will undoubtedly ensue).

Continuing in the vein of conflating omnivory with ultra-processed diets, and veganism with whole food diets, there’s a short segment in episode three about food deserts, urban communities where fast-food outlets and corner stores selling ultra-processed foods are ubiquitous and fresh, nutritious food is hard to find.  Food deserts are a big problem, but they have nothing at all to do with the debate about whether veganism or omnivory is more healthful, and the problem would not be fixed by more people becoming vegans. Veganism doesn’t fix the underlying economic causes of food deserts, and might in fact, make things worse, as more of those corner stores stock up on cheap cereal-based products and processed vegan cheese and meat substitutes.

In the same episode, after extensive hand wringing about the decline in the deliciousness of vegetables, we’re invited to lament the rise in the availability of processed grains and meat. Once again, meat is lumped in with ultra-processed grains and tarnished with the same brush.

While we’re invited to worry about the consumption of processed grains and meat, we’re shown a big basket of French fries deep in bubbling oil. This reminds me that French fries are big players in the game of ‘UPFs doing harm’. The last time I looked, potatoes were vegetables. So’s the oil they’re fried in. Vegetables – like meat – can be served up in their healthful form, or they can be processed in a way that’s damaging to our health. There’s no such thing as ‘vegetables always good’ and ‘meat always bad’. But the consistent message throughout most of the series is that ultra-processed foods are bad (except, as I’ve said, when we’re talking about vegan processed foods) and meat consumption is deemed to be inseparable from processed food consumption.

Equating vegetable consumption with veganism

As an omnivore who loves vegetables and eats lots of them, I’m amused by the consistent conflation of ‘vegetable eating’ with ‘vegan’ in this series. In episode one, for example, there’s some scary stuff about how if there are no plant-based microbes available, your microbes will consume the mucus lining of your stomach. Ok. So, if you don’t eat some plants, your microbes might misbehave. Is this an argument for eating only plants? No, it isn’t.

In episode three we’re taken to an organic vegetable farm to partake of some delicious vegetables. The Cheesy Twins are in heaven. But, as I’ve said, omnivores like eating delicious, organic vegetables too. Why do we get the feeling that access to delicious vegetables is being held up as a reason to go vegan?

Leveraging the longstanding (and unwarranted) bias against saturated fat

It’s customary for vegan advocates to use saturated fat as a stick with which to beat up the omnivore diet. As we’ve already seen, Christopher Gardner wields the stick when he condemns trans fats and saturated fats in the same breath. The stick is subsequently wielded by Miyoko Schinner, who tells us that cheese is chemically and biologically addictive (Evidence?) and full of saturated fat. Gardner returns to tell the story of how saturated fat will drive up your cholesterol, clog your arteries and give you a heart attack. No matter that this story has been discredited repeatedly in the past couple of decades and that a recent review of the literature concluded that there is ‘a lack of rigorous evidence to support continued recommendations either to limit the consumption of saturated fatty acids or to replace them with polyunsaturated fatty acids’.[24]

Late in episode one, we’re told that processed food, with all that saturated fat and hormones, is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s. Once again, processed food is being conflated with an omnivore diet, and saturated fat is being blamed for something that saturated fat didn’t do. Where the good evidence for a link between saturated fat intake and alzheimers? I’ve never seen it. What I have seen is evidence that unsaturated fats that are high in Omega-6 are associated with ‘chronic, low-grade inflammation of the brain, which is a factor in many neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases, including dementia and depression’, and that diets that include animal sourced foods provide an abundance of the nutrients required for a healthy brain.[25]

There’s a segment in which Marion Nestle says that no dietary guideline has ever said ‘eat less meat’ but that they use saturated fat as a euphemism for meat. Euphemisms aside, I’m not sure where Nestle herself comes down on meat or saturated fat. (She has a habit of being vague about both.) What I do know is that red meat doesn’t even contain as much saturated fat as people think it does. A 100g serving of red meat contains approximately 4.5g saturated fat; 100g of avocado contains 3g saturated fat. And anyway, so what?  The ‘saturated fat drives up cholesterol which clogs your arteries and puts you at risk of heart disease’ theory has repeatedly been called into question if not totally debunked. That doesn’t seem to bother Pat Brown though. He says that if we can have meat without saturated fat, ‘it’s a no brainer’. No brains, might be more accurate.

Equating industrial animal agriculture with all of animal agriculture

You Are What You Eat accomplishes one positive thing: exposing the harms caused by the worst of industrial agriculture and forcing people think about where their food might come from. But en route to accomplishing this, it conflates industrial animal agriculture with all animal agriculture, and misses out on a big opportunity to showcase better farming systems and to encourage people to seek their food from these systems.

The affront to higher welfare, regenerative farming systems begins with regenerative farmer Thomas Locke. He starts by explaining his regenerative farming methods, but the film quickly cuts away to some shots of feedlots. Locke says that 96% of all US beef was at some point in a feedlot. Shouldn’t we also be told that US beef cattle spend most of their lives out on grass (and the last few months in a feedlot)? And that there are many farmers like Thomas Locke, both in the US and around the world, whose cattle are raised almost entirely on grass and in a system that replenishes soil and stores carbon? The FAO estimates that just 7-13% of the global meat supply comes from the feedlot system being depicted here. [26] 

The segments about hog farming carry on in the same vein, the feedlot equivalent being the North Carolinian hog farm that sprays liquid pig manure all over neighbouring land and homes. Industrial pig operations such as the one portrayed are a travesty, both an eyesore and a health hazard to both animal and human. But let’s be clear about something: this segment is as an inditement of huge, highly industrial pig farming operations in the US (and their takeover by giant corporations, many of them Chinese). It is not an argument against pig farming per say. In fact, as I write this, I am looking at some photos of an extensive pig farm in Denmark, where the pigs have space to roam and purpose built, straw bedded hutches for winter use. (Thank you, Frank Mitloehner, @GHGguru). And I can drive a few miles down the road here in the UK and see free range pigs happily roaming the land around their own hutches. Isn’t this what we should be aspiring to, both as farmers and consumers? 

We get the same indictment of chicken farming on the basis of what we’re shown about a huge, industrial operation. But there are other, more humane ways of raising chicken, and farmers like Will Harris and Joel Salatin in the US, and farms like Daylsford Farm and those supplying The Ethical Butcher in the UK, are deploying them. The film does us a disservice by failing to acknowledge those sorts of poultry operations and encouraging us to seek them out. In an ideal world we would all eat only the amount of chicken that can be produced from healthy, humane, extensive systems; but in the ideal world envisaged by this film, we would all stop eating chicken altogether and eat mushrooms in its place.

Fishing gets similar treatment. We’re told that seventy five percent of the global catch is caught by industrial methods, our consumption of seafood is catastrophically high, and salmon farming causes pollution, pushes wild fish towards extinction, spreads parasites and viruses, and causes the fish to contain excessive amounts of Omega 6 fats, which are not good for us.

Now, something definitely needs to make fishing – and fish farming - more sustainable. This undoubtedly means we need to eat less of some sorts of fish. But does it mean that we should never eat any fish? Cars that reply on fossil fuels are contributing heavily to global warming, but we don’t say (or most of us don’t) get rid of all the cars. We say, build the electric car. Sometimes we say, drive less and take the train more. But we definitely don’t say, never drive again, any of you.

(Incidentally, there’s an amusing bit of hypocrisy embedded in the fishing segment. Suddenly, the film makers are concerned about an overload of omega 6 (from fish) in our diets. Where was their concern when they were implying that unsaturated fats (high in omega 6) are better than saturated fats? Where will it be when (in the next episode) they come down heavily in favour of the vegan diet, from which it is almost impossible to get adequate Omega 3 but very easy to get too much omega 6?)

As to the question of whether or not more humane, regenerative farming methods could produce enough food, the film makes a definitive judgement (That it can’t). But, where ruminant agriculture is concerned, the level of output that would be possible if regenerative practices became more widespread is far from established. (And it certainly isn’t zero, requiring everyone to adopt the vegetarian or vegan diet being pushed here). There is emerging evidence that regenerative, rotational grass-based systems allow farmers to increase their stocking rates (the liveweight per unit of land) and output while improving rangeland ecology and building soil carbon.[27] Regenerative proponent Dr Alan Williams has calculated that if degraded land in the US was reclaimed for regenerative grazing, it would be possible to more than maintain current output. So, the idea that we can’t provide enough beef via regenerative systems is open to challenge, and many are challenging it.[28] (With chicken, it’s another story, and the eradication of highly industrial methods would almost certainly result in less chicken being available for consumption, and at higher prices).

So much of the story about farming is left untold by the series, much as the wider environmental story and the facts about nutrition and health are left out. It’s almost as though the film makers have been trapped in a cave for the past decade, unable to access the news that well managed cattle grazing on land can help improve soil fertility and carbon sequestration rates, or that, even though cattle seem to take up a lot of land, most of that land is totally unsuitable for any kind of cropping, and indeed might suffer if it was simply rewilded and left to its own devices. (Unless it was populated with wild ruminants, in which case, we might not see a reduction in methane emissions). They’ve certainly not had access to sophisticated thinking about global methane emissions, of which 70 percent come from sources other than cattle, or about the important relationship between methane sources and sinks. For anyone else who’s new to these topics, I urge you to listen to the panel discussion about the role of livestock in a warming world at the Oxford Real Farming Conference 2024, during which Professor Michael Lee from Harper Adams University explains it all in simple terms (At the 28 minute and 1 hr marks).[29] Lee packs more insight and intelligence into ten minutes than the Netflix folks managed to squeeze into four hours.

This is a good place to leave you, in the safe hands of Professor Lee and the other members of the ORFC panel. If you can find the time to watch the entire ORFC session, you’ll learn a great deal about why and how livestock is unfairly targeted in the food/climate debate, and why we need animal sourced foods in the diet. You’ll have everything you need to write your own review of You Are what You Eat.

As for me, I live in hope that Netflix will one day make a documentary with the following story line: Industrial farming of both crops and animals undermines animal welfare, biodiversity and soil health, and ultimately threatens the earth’s ability to absorb carbon and mitigate climate change. But since humans need to eat, and since animal sourced foods provide nutrients that are vital for human health and food security in a world where so much land is unsuitable for growing crops, all of our efforts must be directed towards supporting the widespread use of regenerative farming practices. Both human and planetary health depend on our doing so.

How long do you suppose I’ll have to wait?

[1] https://medium.com/anecdotal-evidence/you-are-what-you-eat-a-review-e7f5fa1c8d9f

[2] https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/you-are-what-you-eat-twin-experiment-netflix-bias-funding-2454836/

[3] https://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2024/01/you-are-what-you-eat-a-twin-experiment-netflix-review/

[4] https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/you-are-what-you-eat-review-if-this-show-doesnt-turn-you-vegan-nothing-will/a1591295600.html

[5] https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/25283535/netflix-documentary-you-are-what-you-eat-twin-experiment/

[6] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2812392?resultClick=3

[7] https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2023/12/vegan-vs-omnivore-diet/

[8] https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2023/12/vegan-vs-omnivore-diet/

[9] https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2021/06/rebutting-the-cholesterol-hypothesis/

[10] https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2021/06/cholesterol-mortality-world-graphs/

[11] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20U.S.%20greenhouse%20gas,sequestration%20from%20the%20land%20sector.

[12] https://news.trust.org/item/20180918083629-d2wf0

[13] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-7/

[14] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

[15]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912420300109#:~:text=Some%20nut%20types%20are%20on,(2180%20L%2Fkg).

[16] https://www.nfuonline.com/media/sqhnllb3/the-facts-about-british-red-meat-and-milk.pdf

[17] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1707322114

[18]https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003763#:~:text=Together%2C%20such%20potential%20cardioprotective%20components,%25%20%5B44%2C45%5D.

[19] https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/44/28/2580/7192538?guestAccessKey=ba932e4a-2bd8-4fe4-b30b-c903bbf7c47c&login=false&utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=eurheartj&utm_medium=email

[20] https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/full-article/meat-and-cancer

[21] https://www.nutritionix.com/food/mushroom/100-g

[22] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3352154

[23] Taubes, Gary. Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin and Successful Treatments. London, Granta Publications, 2024, p17

[24] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34684304/

[25] Cross, Maria. How to Feed Your Brain, Albert Bridge Books, 2023, p87

[26] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

[27] https://www.soilassociation.org/our-work-in-scotland/scotland-farming-programmes/resources-for-farmers/grassland-management/higher-output-with-regenerative-grazing/

  https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/grassland-management/rotational-grazing-allows-farmer-to-up-stocking-rate-by-40;

[28] Williams, Allen R. ‘Can We Produce Grass Fed beef at Scale?’ GRAZE Magazine. 2018.

[29] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hcQTn5ncCE

[30] https://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2024/01/you-are-what-you-eat-a-twin-experiment-netflix-review/