Saturday, March 1, 2014

Criticism of the movie "The Perfect Human Diet"

Before I begin this critique of this film I want to say I can see how that would be people in this world who might need to eat meat or fish or dairy every week. The chemistry of each person is different blood types are different our origins are different. This alone blows away the concept of anything that might be called "The Perfect Human Diet."  Making any attempt to pigeonhole this is to defeat yourself right from the beginning. I know the intentions of the producers of this film were good but to rely on academia and historians for answers is risky at best.   I don't know about you, but I get very pissed off when people mess with my mind. The half truths in this film made me so angry I was forced to turn it off twice during the viewing. I pressed on and watched the end of the film sick to my stomach from the deception that was being perpetrated by this film and sad because the gentleman who narrated the film was sincerely looking for real answers. He went to the places that he thought had the greatest minds with the right answers. But he failed. And at the same time he threw mud on some of the best films about human health and nutrition that have been created like Forks Over Knives. Unbelievable but true. Read on if you must…. So here's my review.


   The first thing I have to say is that this movie was an insult to my intelligence. It was also so sad that this man was so very misled by archaeologists basing assumptions on conjecture obscure physicians who I never heard of giving advice in the grocery stores to buy pork tenderloin large cuts of beef etc. Not even mentioning that the beef should be organic or grass fed. There was nothing in this film that stood on firm ground of credibility in terms of the proof of animal protein being the primary source of human evolution. They practically say we are who and what we are because of eating animal flesh. They don't even explore the work of Terence Mckenna which attributes the quick advance of human intelligence and the rising consciousness to the discovery of hallucinogenic mushrooms. This is a story, a movie produced by a man who was sincerely looking for real answers is sadly dragged down the road of ignorance by what he thought to be well-educated "professionals."

I suspect the meat industry had something to do with this film. But then that is the conspiracy theorist in me. I'm sure the dairy industry did not jump for joy but to protect part of an industry or your interests at any cost is worth the sacrifice of another if what you have to loses everything.

The meat and dairy industries are notoriously corrupt evil empires that will murder and kill not only animals but people if you get in their way. Look what they did to Oprah Winfrey. I rest my case. These people are carnivorous mobsters. And that goes way way back hundreds of years as these cartels formed their empires. It will virtually do anything to keep marketshare and they don't care one bit about your health.

When I started the movie I was looking for a really great film insights into health and wellness.  What I got was a documentary that was built on flawed logic, flawed assumptions and flawed conjectures.

The basic gist is, since evolution and history says that for 99.9% of human history we humans have been hunter gatherers, our diet should be like that.

But that is a very flawed way of thinking. Just because our ancestors were meat eaters doesn't mean meat is better than vegetables for us. Our ancestors were not exactly optimizing their potential, just because they were living like animals.

Evolution does not create perfect scenarios and perfect species of perfect health, that is a fallacy this documentary is based on. It assumes our ancestors were eating a diet, that they had perfectly evolved into. Which is not the case.

While i agree with half the documentary (the half condemning modern diet of processed foods), the other half of it is a load of shit, false truth and false logic.

I present here some of these flaws the documentary ignores.

1) Our ancestors no doubt starved many months, many weeks, many days of the year, through winter, when they could not find hunt food to the point where many no doubt died. This documentary completely ignores this fact when promoting this high meat diet theory.

2) Our ancestors also ate insects, larvae, and other unhealthy and disgusting things, at no point do they start promoting a diet of insects. Which again is another example of picking and choosing history.

3) Our ancestors also didn't bath or clean themselves at all. No one would say poor hygiene and living and eating like a wild dog is better for us, just because our ancestors did it for millions of years. So why use the same premise for dieting?

4) another example since our ancestors never exercised and only exerted themselves when hunting, optimal health means we should not exercise unless chasing a deer. Which they probably only did once a month for a few minutes and only in large groups.

5) historically human societies have been fishermen rather than hunters. This a fact the video ignores, as game food was not guaranteed whist fish from the ocean or rivers largely was. Thus most civilizations were situated on coastlines and near rivers.

Ultimately the point is, our ancestors did not have an optimal best perfect diet, trying to mimic them is like trying to copy a C student in an exam, you are not going to better a better grade.

Bad logic.

If you look at native aborigine populations in south America, Australia who are following very much our ancestors diet, and look at the athletes from the Olympics, anyone with half a brain can tell that the athletes in the Olympics are healthier and better. Whilst the aborigine population are sickly and poorly malformed, malnourished, etc.

Our ancestors also rarely lived beyond 40, average lifespan was probably around in the late 30's. so evolution hasn't engineered the paleo-primal diet to exactly keep our body ship shape beyond 40 (going by their own logic).

So that's another flaw in using the logic of our ancestors diet is evolutionary wise the best for us. Frankly documentary is a load of baloney.

But they are right in that the paleo-primal diet is better than the modern processed sugar, salt, spices, oils artificial chemical diet we have in the 21st century.

But they missed the mark completely with regard to the intake of me the meat.   If our ancestors were anything like normal hunter gatherers they would most likely have not had much meat in their diet as consistently as modern people do or that the paleo-primal diet likes to infer. As you can't exactly catch and cook a deer with a spear 3 times a day.

Even lions eat only once a week in the wild, sometimes once a month periodically, and even starve when the herd migrates. As eating meals isn't exactly on the dot, breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner time like we do.

Saying no to wheat is a fallacy as no doubt our ancestors must have eaten wild grain, in order for them to become farmers. So it was part of their diet, which the documentary ignores.

I find it difficult to restrict my emotions when I right about this movie because it was so flawed. I am just glad they did not attack the work of Max Gersten because if they did I would be on the phone to that director first thing tomorrow morning.

My apologies to all the films that this one insulted and diminished in the section of the movie where these films-these great films were listed as being wrong.

Bill Zimmermann 2014 

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