Hungry For Change - Movie Review

I just finished watching the premiere of this movie (available for free until March 31st). Although the information isn't new to me anymore, I still find it fascinating. The first half of the movie lines up perfectly with the "clean eating" aspect of this blog.  I wish everyone in America would watch at least the first 50 minutes.

My favorite quote:

"We're overfed [...] but starving to death."

They make the point that a human could easily eat 10,000 calories a day but still desire more because we are not getting what we need from the "edible non-foods" that make up most of our diets. I totally agree with that and I think the average shape of the average American today backs up that fact.

I related very much to the stories about dieting and deprivation. I also like their first few suggestions for change:

1. Focus on adding in good food instead of forbidding the bad (e.g. serve a salad with dinner) 
2. Replace overly processed bad foods with it's exact same healthy equivalent (e.g. replace hormone filled and anti-biotic laden milk with local, fresh milk)
3. Watch out for MSG, HFCS, and other addictive, harmful chemicals

Towards the middle of the film, the focus shifted away from hard facts to what I felt was more speculative. They encourage you to spend time visualizing how you want to look and feel and loving yourself. It all comes off as a little hokey, but at the same time rings true, if that makes any sense. I do know that we are masters of shaming ourselves, however, and that certainly is not working!

I am also not loving the juicing plug. I guess if you are cutting out so many other foods, you almost have to juice to get enough calories into your body. To be perfectly honest, the one time I tried a "green" drink, I could barely choke it down. Besides, I have no moral or health reservations against buying a happy cow and using it all up over the course of a year. So while I am very supportive of giving our bodies more natural foods, I consider eating happy cows and chickens to be perfectly natural.

I also don't like that they talk up the diets of our ancestors, but only propose a diet super high in vegetables as optimal. In fact, any traditional ethnic diet is optimal. The Inuits lived almost 100% off of animal products (which they do mention in the film, but then use that to justify adding wild-caught salmon to your menu). But Inuits did not just eat salmon. They ate seal, caribou, polar bear, and whale (including blubber). And their health was off the charts.

I guess my big problem is that I don't think we are going to win over the population by promoting veggies and juicing. But I do believe that good foods can crowd out bad foods so we can at least start there.

So overall, I highly recommend at least the first half of this video. If you can bring yourself to follow all the suggestions in the last half, by all means do so. But anything that shines a light on the problems with what we are putting in our bodies and calling food is a winner in my book.

UPDATE (3/26): After discussing this movie with a few others, I felt I needed to update my review. I really want to stress that I do not agree that juicing is critical to a healthy lifestyle. I actually think it is rather wasteful. I completely agree with what my sister posted today about juicing fruit. If you have the fortitude and resources to juice and drink that quantity of vegetables, however, I am not going to try and talk you out of it. I really don't want anyone to feel like juicing is the only way to a healthy life though.