Over the weekend I spoke at a doctors' affiliate shindig at CrossFit headquarters in Santa Cruz, California.  The day-long agenda opened with all 100 of us watching the new anti-meat documentary GAMECHANGERS.  If you haven't seen it, it's extremely professional, certainly the slickest of all the anti-meat docos. 

             The rest of the day each speaker offered a rebuttal and essentially debunked the movie as unscientific propaganda.  Cleverly presented, to be sure.  Normal people who watch this movie come away convinced that meat will kill them.

             If you haven't seen it, the basic pitch is that real men eat plants.  Roughly 75 percent of vegans are women; eating meat and grilling are masculine generally.  So this movie presents alleged vegan athletes, with a decidedly male dominance, including a penis experiment, to show that veganism makes you stronger, more manly, and certainly more healthy.  It also means you don't have to kill an animal, which is manly restraint.  A real man can shut down base manly instincts.  Real men overcome their hunter instincts.

            In this short post, I don't have time to look at it from every angle presented at the shindig, but here are at least a couple.  First, the movie slithers around all sorts of definitions for the umbrella idea of plant-based diets.  It included cameo shots of Tom Brady, who eats salmon 4 or 5 days a week (I guess if I made his salary I could eat salmon 5 days a week) and others who are definitely not vegans.  It moves seamlessly between eating meat a couple days a week to eating fish,  and vegetarianism, all in a broad brush to make you think they're talking about veganism.  That's clever speak sleight of hand, and it's done subtly enough that if you don't have pencil in hand to write down all the slippery dietary phrases, you'll miss it and come away with "Oh all these folks are vegans."  Ain't the case.

             Secondly, you can't see what they don't show.  By allowing you to only see what they want you to see, you have no way of knowing what was behind the curtain.  For example, when they show a supposedly plant-based athlete winning 5th in a field of 20, the obvious question is what did the one who finished first eat?  But we're never told.

             Furthermore, even we assume their star athletes are vegans (which they aren't) we have no way of knowing if they'd be better or worse by eating some meat or cheese or drinking a glass of milk.  You can't make any kind of comparisons if you don't know what could have been.    From a debaters' point of view, this is probably the biggest weakness of the film's argument.

             One section features a dozen or so players on the Tennessee Titans football team who began assembling routinely for plant-based meals and subsequently made a good run in post-season playoffs.  The team's success, according to the movie, is because of these plant-based meals.  What a joke.  Often when people begin talking about food and taking an interest in health, they reduce sugary drink consumption, Dunkin' Donuts and highly processed food generally.  Goodness, these players assembling routinely gelled them as team mates, helped them work better together, and all the things that winning, cohesive teams need to succeed.  To present as science their post-season success as attributable to veganism is infinitely absurd--but it's so cleverly presented that anyone watching with their brain in neutral will exit believing it was veganism for sure.

             This documentary will send thousands and thousands of people into the veganism experiment.  Many of the CrossFitters in that room were post-vegans who fell apart physically and got their health back with exercise and high protein meat eating.  In fact, a couple were carnivores, who eat nothing but meat.  I was the least buff guy there.  I need a quick trip to Wal-Mart to feel good about my physique again.

             We all know aberrations. Remember the guy in school who made straight As and never studied?  Remember the girl who could run faster than anyone but never practiced at home?  How about the born comedian?  The born engineer?  First, we're different.  Second, the occasional aberration does not a pattern make. 

            Have you seen GAMECHANGERS?