This movie appears to be vegan propaganda. If you search say on Youtube for the video you’ll see a load of links like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N_7C71ruxc by vegan activists giving what they promise is a review of the film … it turns out to be just more marketing for the movie.
I did find the movie eventually and watched it - there’s 92 mins of my life I’ll never get back
The movie asserts without evidence that meat causes cancer. There has never been a randomized controlled clinical trial that has been able to show this, despite well funded attempts.
The only evidence has been observational. It has been observed, for example, in the data from the Nurses health study, or the Healthcare professionals followup that when they asked hundreds of thousands of people once a year to write down all the food they ate the previous year, and to summarize their health status … that people who said they ate a LOT of preserved meat APPEARED to get slightly more bowel cancer.
It was also observed in the same data that people who ate less saturated fat and more polyunsaturated oils had slightly less heart disease.
What is interesting about that last assertion, is that we have ACTUAL randomized controlled (in some cases “Double blind”) clinical trials to show the opposite. When you take a large group of people for whom you provide all their food, and randomly give half saturated fats (eg: butter) and the other half polyunsaturated replicas that look identical (eg: margarine) and even the researchers are unaware who is getting what — then the ones who got the polyunsaturated oils were SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to get heart disease or die of other cause at a higher rate.
See, what I believe we see in the data from the Nurses health initiative and other large epidemiology studies is what is called the “Healthy user bias”. These studies collected data over the time when the AHA and the dietary guidelines and the Surgeon general were giving the population a concerted message to do more exercise, reduce smoking, reduce saturated fat, get more vegetables in your diet, take essential vitamins, treat stress, get more sleep. A lot of this data was collected from health care professionals on the theory that they would be reliable source of diagnostic information … but they would ALSO be well aware of the health messages.
What if a significant amount of the people who lowered saturated fat also got exercise and took vitamins and got 8 hours sleep every night and quit smoking? You would see in your data an ASSOCIATION between saturated fat consumption and heart disease (because smoking is a major risk for heart disease). You might also OBSERVE a link between red meat (which has more saturated fat) and Cancer (which smoking is a major risk factor for). You might also find that people who ate a lot more processed red meat were poorer, and people who ate filet mignon instead had spent more money on preventative health care.
The studies they refer to that observed an association between processed red meat and coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes (Mozzafarian) was from the same epidemiological data collected from annual food frequency recall surveys (ie: dodgy data that has been math tortured). If you read that study they observe no effect with unprocessed red meat, and a small effect observed with processed red meat. The movie performs some hand waving in the general direction of that study then asserts that “The link between eating meat and Diabetes is UNDENIABLE”.
Neal Barnard, Michael Greger and Caldwell Esselstyn have been vegan propagandists for decades. They appear to believe that eating animals is bad, and that the science will eventually show them to have been correct all along, but in the meantime they will cherry pick studies and torture their conclusions to try to convince us that the science is settled.
All they need to do is one Randomized controlled clinical trial over a significant fraction of a human lifespan where one cohort had animal based food and the other had identical essential nutrition from plants … and they might be able to make their case about the health outcome difference between herbivorous, omnivorous and carnivorous diets.
But I guess making quips about people eating coagulated cow pus (AKA cheese) is a substitute for doing actual work.