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So today is Day 3 of my juice feast and all is still well. I finished doing some more weight work for my back and chest. I'm a tad sore from yesterday, but not too bad. My skin is really getting baby soft....
So on the recommendation of a friend I ordered and watched the DVD Fat Head.
I was not impressed but it did make some good points.
First, the good points:
1) He was right that Americans consume WAY too much high-fructose corn syrup in the form of soft drinks and in baked goods and desserts and even in catsup. He says the difference of his diet and Morgan Spurlock's in Supersize Me was that he limited carbs to 100grams a day and drank water, iced tea and diet soda.
2) He was also right that kids and Americans get way less exercise than they used to. Kids don't walk to and from school like they used to, instead they are picked up by parents or escorted via school buses. Adults used to do manual labor much more frequently and instead now there are way more desk/computer jobs.
The vegan diet that is often promoted is based around corn tortillas, pasta, bread, baked goods, etc. This has led a lot of people to gain weight and experience subpar health when in fact the true vegan diet should be centered around whole grains and legumes. Dr. Joel Fuhrman is not a big fan of grains and instead advocates more of a base of greens, beans and nuts and limiting grains.
Here's what I didn't like about the film:
1) He really seemed to have an ax to grind with Morgan Spurlock's film Supersize Me and seemed to feel that it was backed by and pushing a vegetarian agenda. Nowhere did Spurlock ever mention that people eat vegetarian; his girlfriend was a vegan chef, true, and he reversed all of his bad bloodwork numbers by going on her vegan cleansing diet after his 30-day McDonald's binge, but he did not stay eating that way nor wanted to.
2) His blood work at the end of the 28 days was not impressive. He lost 12 pounds...which sounds impressive, but one can lose that in ONE WEEK via water weight loss by removing high salt items alone. He doesn't share with us a week by week blow like Spurlock did, so we really don't know when that weight was lost. The implication is that is was a steady average 3lb loss per week, which may not have been the case.
3) According to the Framingham Study, his cholesterol at the end of the month, while lower, was still in a very dangerous range of 222. He had Sally Fallon of the Western Price Foundation and the Eades, authors of Protein power, try to convince us that we needed all this cholesterol in our bodies to be healthy, but I trust Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who helped President Clinton prevent a recurrence of his heart disease as well as many others over these two, who, I couldn't help but notice--along with pretty much everyone else in the film--had huge bags under their eyes from the collection of fats in their blood stream.
Nobody in this documentary inspired me by their healthy appearance. Not like Annette Larkins or Tonya Zavasta, all of whom are older than this subject and the other people who appeared in this film.
Eating 50% of your calories from fat is a lot, and only 100 grams of carbs a day is very challenging.
And advocating eating fried food???
They tried to say that the Supersize Me film was racist by profiling the overweight and poor as being black and mexican. Ummm, I live in Idaho where there are very few blacks and latinos and there are a TON of overweight white people.
At the beginning of the film, the says he waited outside of McDonald's waiting for someone to force him inside to eat. He says no one ever did that, and yet I clearly remember as a child being made to go to certain restaurants, including McDonald's BECAUSE THAT WAS WHAT MY PARENT FELT LIKE FEEDING ME THAT NIGHT.
My mother fed me macaroni and cheese from Kraft and Chef Boy R Dees Ravioli's as a child because she was an alcoholic single mom and those foods were easy to fix. I didn't have a choice in the matter, and, contrary to another claim he tried to debunk, they WERE addictive and it took me a better portion of my adult life breaking those addictions. THAT'S what McDonald's knows and why they market to kids: it sets up lifelong addictions and habits that become deeply ingrained.
He also started off his film with a parody of his "last dinner" being a tofu/quinoa meals that took him 1/2 half to finish because he couldn't stomach it. Trust me, if that had been his regular diet he would never have gotten overweight like he had.
The remainder of the film trying to convince us that America didn't have an obesity problem, and that what is considered overweight is not really overweight was ludicrous. My own eyes can see we have a problem and yes, skinny people get sick, too, which is why this film's focus on weight loss to the exclusion of health really peeved me.
They seemed to include all sorts of credible-sounding science supporting their claims, but outside of the aforementioned points of high-fructose corn syrup and processed carbs and lack of exercise, they really revealed that their true motives was sour grapes against their perceived "vegetarian agenda".
Nowhere was a mention made about the results that Dr. Gabriel Cousens achieved in his documentary "Raw for 30 Days" with a low-glycemic raw vegan diet with 6 diabetics.
I am convinced more than ever that a raw vegan diet is the healthiest on the planet simply because the people who I've known who have been doing it look the most radiant and are glowing.
Check out
Annette Larkins,
Tonya Zavasta,
Lillian Muller and
Karyn Calabrese. All of these people are over 50 (the star of the Fat Head film was 46) and Karyn is 65 and Annette is 71. It is undeniable that a raw vegan diet brings about an anti-aging effect (just like 70-year old Gabriel Cousens shows as he looks amazing) and youthful health and vitality.
