Since you'll probably be in bed watching Netflix all week anyway, you might as well learn something. These food documentaries are entertaining, shocking, and eye-opening, and they'll help you stay woke over spring break about nutrition and the food industry. You'll learn a lot, and you might just find yourself craving some kale or green juice.
1. "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead"
This film follows two men as they endeavor to lose weight and get healthy with the help of green juice. It starts with one man going on a "juice cleanse" to rid his body of disease and excess fat, but as he travels across the country to share his success story, another man jumps on the bandwagon and becomes a believer. The main argument is that the American diet is dangerously lacking in micronutrients, which are all the vitamins and minerals that come from veggies (and not starches). Giving the body the micronutrients it needs in the form of fresh juice allowed these men and many others to miraculously turn their lives around.
2. "Cowspiracy"
If you're even slightly interested in vegetarianism or veganism, this film is for you. It doesn't resort to scare tactics or guilt-tripping like many pro-vegan films do, but rather shows the many other harmful side effects that consumption comes with besides animal cruelty and health problems. Namely, the focus is on the environment and the amount of land, water, and grain that go into animal agriculture. The guy who made this film encountered threats and opposition from powerful people in the animal agriculture industry because the industry doesn't want people to know that meat production is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (we've been blaming cars this whole time!). If you consider yourself an environmentalist, and you eat meat, you need to see this film.
3. "Food Chains"
As a culture, we love to talk about food. What we don't love to talk about, however, is where our food comes from. More often than not our fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and meat products (so basically all food) come from the hands of migrant farmworkers who are exploited by the food industry. This film follows a group of Florida farmworkers fight for fair wages and better working conditions. Knowing that our good doesn't appear out of thin are but rather comes from someone's hands is very important; watch this film to learn more about the workers that make up the backbone of the American economy.
4. "PlantPure Nation"
Most of us grew up with the food pyramid that has grains on the bottom, meaning that we were supposed to consume more grains than fruits and vegetables combined, and just as much meat and dairy as veggies too. Sorry kids, but that's just not true. Hopefully, we all know that by now.
This film focuses on the fact that until very recently, discussions of health and nutrition seem to leave out how important vegetables are. Animal protein is not essential and is actually harmful to human health, but for some reason, it has been lauded as more healthy than vegetables. What the body really needs is pure plant-based nutrition. This truth has been buried and rejected by lobby groups that profit from the sale of meat and dairy, so anyone who wants to spread the truth will face huge opposition.
5. "Fed Up"
When the "obesity epidemic" in this country became a national crisis, the rhetoric focused on diet and exercise and blamed obese people for being lazy, gluttonous, and lacking will-power. This film seeks to dispel that notion, claiming that there are much larger and more powerful forces at play that cause obesity in children and adults. For instance, it costs far more to feed a family a healthy meal of fresh vegetables than it does to serve pre-packaged, frozen meals or fast food. And those packaged foods are pumped full of addictive sugars, fats, and chemicals that cause obesity and disease. Watch the film to learn more about this complicated issue.
The common theme of many of these films is this: powerful people in this country don't want you to know about how dangerous meat, dairy, preservatives, and sugar are for your health. You can prevent so many lethal diseases by ditches these foods in favor of fresh, pure plant-based foods. This seems obvious, but for so long, this truth has been buried by fad diets and meat/dairy lobbyists, and the media will still try to convince you that a diet like 'paleo' or 'low-carb' is healthier than just eating your veggies. Stay woke over break, and give your body some of the plants that it wants!