Forks Over Knives

"Let Food Be Thy Medicine."  -- Hippocrates (father of Western medicine)

This weekend I watched the 2011 documentary "Forks Over Knives".  Written and directed by Lee Fulkerson, this eye-opening film chronicles the decades of nutritional medicine and biochemistry work carried out by T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D. The film's aim is to expose the detrimental trend the United States' nutritional habits have followed over the decades, its contribution to higher incidence of cancers and heart disease in our population, and to support the claim that a whole foods, plant-based diet can not only halt but in some cases reverse the symptoms of multiple diseases, some of them deadly. They focused primarily on heart disease and diabetes and how strictly by following a whole foods, plant-based diet patients can go off their medications and their conditions can be completely managed if not reversed.

Forks Over Knives uncovers the perils of a diet high in animal products and processed foods and tracks the progress of several heart and/or diabetes patients before and after they changed their diet to one based on whole foods and plants. It details the pioneering work of Drs. Campbell and Esselstyn. Furthermore, it also uncovers some of the ugly truths regarding our government agencies and the influence that the private food industry has had on their policy-making, policies that influence the dietary habits of our entire population, including our school children. The website has a complete synopsis.

I found it particularly poignant when Dr. Esselstyn was talking about how many people say a plant-based diet is extreme. He pointed out that about half a million people in this country this year will have to have the front half of their body opened in half and their heart exposed. That's extreme. And he's right. They make the case for how this can be avoided with diet, no medications necessary.

I did notice they barely used the word 'vegan' per se, instead reiterating "plant-based" to describe the diet they were promoting. Then again, 'vegan' is considered more of a lifestyle than just a dietary choice, a lifestyle which also incorporates choices driven by ethical and moral viewpoints. The film isn't exactly delving into the ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding the consumption of animal products, but instead is suggesting a way to eat for better health and disease prevention.

I have to say that I have not read the publications by any of the physicians or research scientists on this film. It is not until I were to do so that I could take that information as hard fact or at the very least draw my own conclusions. Just from my own experience in research, I suspect that for every claim made in this film there are both supporters and dissenters, the latter probably with their own sets of data ready to debunk every stated claim, with both groups equally well-educated and experienced. A little Hegelian Dialectic, if you will...

That being said, I got a general sense that the science presented was perhaps a bit oversimplified, and it may be that they did so due to the broad and diverse nature of the target audience. I would be particularly interested in the study where rats whose diet was switched back and forth between a 20% casein and a 5% casein diet showed either increase or decrease in number of tumors, respectively, as if cancer were under the control of something as simple as a dietary protein switch. I would need to hear more about what's going on here.

Nevertheless, I still think that this is a very interesting documentary for anyone interested in learning more about the correlation between nutrition and disease, about what we've been doing to our bodies by consuming a diet rich in animal products and highly-processed foods, and the potential for preventing or even reversing disease and live healthier lives by following a whole foods, plant-based diet.

"The doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs,

but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition." -- Thomas Edison