Documentary “Nutritionists”

As of late, there have been more than a few controversial documentaries released concerning the topic of human nutrition. And although I am constantly filled in on many of the claims made in these documentaries, I have yet to sit down and watch any of the recently popular ones. Now, maybe you could could argue the stance that my opinion on some of these documentaries is not valid since I have not watched them, and I’ll accept that criticism, although I feel I’m asked about these films enough to be familiar with most of the lucrative claims that are shouted throughout most of them. Moreover, the fact that these claims made are indeed so lucrative is exactly why I refuse to sit down and spend hours of my time watching them.

I’m really not trying to sound closed-minded here, but let me at least lay out the formula that I find most of these nutrition “experts” use to construct their documentaries:

1. Identify a food or group of foods and demonize them. Blame a myriad of health issues and negative lifestyle outcomes on them. No gray areas. No nuanced thinking. Cherry-pick the scientific data that supports this idea and use it to bolster your argument and ignore the existence of any and all scientific data that does not support it.
2. Prop yourself up as the nutritional savior who’s found the strategy for circumventing or eliminating these foods and command people what they should be eating instead. Keep ignoring nuance and all the nutritional data that has been collected over the past hundred years. Only your specific theories matter now.
3. When data to support a claim is lacking, always turn to an anecdote. Show a professional athlete who at least somewhat follows your protocol and offer them some money and airtime. After all, their elite genetics and decades of training didn’t get them to where they are, your nutritional theories did.
4. Play to the audience’s emotions as much as possible. Proclaim your open-mindedness, but also make sure the viewer knows that anyone who disagrees with you is part of some big, lying, evil industry that only cares about money. Your way is not only the way from a nutritional perspective, but also from a humanitarian perspective.

I could probably add a few more steps here but you probably get the point. And as much as I hate to admit it, this formula makes sense because it SELLS. People love controversy as a form of entertainment (i.e. the hundreds of reality TV shows on air now), and they just aren’t going to watch anything that’s not entertaining, even if they claim to be watching it for educational purposes. That’s why all these mass-streamed nutritional documentaries have one thing in common: controversy. A nutrition textbook, on the other hand, contains virtually no controversy despite drawing from the largest amounts of available data (it also increases the effectiveness of your bullshit detector when you hear some of the egregious arguments made by these films).

Sadly, the general public just isn’t going to line up out the doors to watch a nutrition documentary that shows much of the well-documented truths that have been supported a long, long time now:

• Humans are omnivores.
• Calories over content.
• People living in first-world countries probably aren’t deficient in vitamins and minerals.
• Everything in moderation is generally a good rule of thumb.
• Sustainability is paramount.
• Most people with poor diets can attribute their unwanted outcomes to their own poor decision-making.
• We haven’t really learned any new groundbreaking things about nutrition in a long time, but what we do know works pretty damn well when applied sensibly.