DOCUMENTARY REVIEW: Food Matters
Let Food be thy Medicine and thy Medicine be Food. - Hippocrates
Synopsis:
‘Food Matters’ is a hard hitting, fast paced look at our current state of health. Despite the billions of dollars of funding and research into new so-called cures we continue to suffer from a raft of chronic ills and every day maladies. Patching up an over-toxic and over-indulgent population with a host of toxic therapies and nutrient sparse foods is definitely not helping the situation.
The filmmakers have interviewed several world leaders in nutrition and natural healing who claim that not only are we harming our bodies with improper nutrition, but that the right kind of foods, supplements and detoxification can be used to treat chronic illnesses as fatal as terminally diagnosed cancer.
As a health nut who had heard the high sung praises of this film, I was actually quite underwhelmed by this documentary. I was expecting chewy investigative journalism and all I got were fast-paced sound bites. With news itself becoming more and more about 5-minute quippy vignettes, I was not 100% surprised that the movie skewed in this direction. I was, however, disappointed.
Please note that I agree with the message of this film: you are what you eat and as such, you can be the cause in achieving your optimal health. I did learn interesting things from this film including - SPOILER ALERT! - the successful use of Niacin to treat depression and the successful use of Vitamin C to prevent and cure illness. Overall, however, I felt that this film preached too much to the Whole Foods Choir. I felt it would have been more beneficial to present its audience a more fully-formed argument against relying solely on the world of biomedicine or alternately a more fully-formed alternative to that world. And ideally, both.
The filmmakers, for instance, threw out a lot of statistics: including 106,000 Americans die each year from taking pharmaceutical drugs as prescribed. While this might sound like a scary statistic, please note that out of 306 million US citizens, this number represents 0.03% of the population.* I would not care about their use of this number if they didn’t downplay the alleged death tolls of people superdosing on vitamins. Wait - are we only allowed to quote the statistics of Big Pharma which support our argument, while sweeping those of the Holistic Underdog under the rug? It’s this lack of due diligence or argumentative consistency that can cause preventative nutrition not to be taken seriously. And as someone who advocates for preventative nutrition, I was disappointed.
I would give this documentary 2.5 stars. It was interesting but suffered from wanting to provide a great quantity of information in lieu of presenting them in great quality. I would only recommend Food Matters to those already have done their homework on the dietary What Next? Because if you didn’t already know how to eat based on buying into their argument, this film won’t entirely help you. It does reaffirm one’s conviction, however, to continue being accountable for one’s own health.
* Please note that that does not excuse, deaths - no matter how small the toll - which could have been prevented.
