Devlin Brown at the water cooler: For a healthier you, choose plant-based over plant-only diet

I recently watched a fascinating Netflix documentary and would like to know if I should switch to plant-based eating to be healthier?

The Netflix documentary You Are What you Eat: A Twin Experiment certainly has a fascinating proposition: what happens when genetically identical people eat differently? 

The idea is that a group of identical twins would be put into an experiment where one would eat a vegan diet and another would eat an omnivore diet. During the first four weeks all their meals were supplied and in the second four weeks they were left to cook for themselves. 

It is unclear why those conducting the experiment would relinquish such control. Perhaps to mimic real-life outcomes? As in, none of us can be trusted to actually do what we say and every house has a secret cookie jar?

The documentary followed the actual study, which was a randomised clinical trial of 22 healthy, adult, identical twin pairs, and found that “those consuming a healthy vegan diet showed significantly improved low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentration, fasting insulin level and weight loss compared with twins consuming a healthy omnivorous diet”. 

We should all know that LDL —  bad cholesterol — would drop noticeably when eating a plant-based diet. All literature agrees with this. 

In this particular study, the vegan group also had a loss in lean muscle mass (I’d quit for this reason alone) and their fasted vitamin B12, HDL and glucose levels decreased, while their triglycerides increased. The paper’s authors say these changes were “nonsignificant”. The vegan sample lost more weight than the omnivores, with many of them saying they couldn’t eat enough of the diet to feel satiated.

The Water Cooler can’t understand why the experiment chose to compare the vegan diet with some weird omnivore diet that by our layperson standards did not appear “healthy” at all, complete with what looked like processed sausages! Imagine if they had compared the vegan diet with the Mediterranean diet, for example, which has also produced peer-reviewed evidence of good outcomes on cardiovascular and metabolic health. 

The problem, though, doesn’t lie with the study. It lies with the documentary, which displayed images of processed junk food every time they said the word “meat”. It soon became unclear whether the focus was on actual health or environmental activism. “Every time you eat a steak, a little puff of smoke goes up in the Amazon. That smoke is the ‘second hand smoke from your burger’.” Sound bite gold.

All sane humans would agree that what is happening in those mass cattle and salmon farms, as well as the deforestation of the Amazon, is horrific. It’s just not clear how this fits into the experiment of trying to discover how identical genes express differently when eating different types of food.

One of the study’s funders is the Vogt Foundation, which funds “organisations which promote plant-based products”. The doctor in charge of the study disclosed that he has received funding, “outside the submitted work”, from Beyond Meat, which sells plant-based burger patties and other products. 

It is obvious the documentary producers set out with an agenda and the result is a reality TV show for anti-meat and environmental activists. For that reason, the documentary itself goes up in a little puff of smoke, but the content of the study it follows doesn’t.

The health benefits of plant-based eating are well known. Processed junk food is dangerous. Too much or too little food is dangerous. No diet is perfect.  

This author eats as much of the plant-based diet presented in the documentary as possible, in addition to good-quality, unprocessed meat. One could argue it is a plant-based diet and not a plant diet. It is selectively omnivore, where you choose good food and don’t just eat every processed thing in front of you.

Take charge of your health and ensure you eat the correct amounts of macro and micronutrients, and that you exercise to preserve, or increase, your lean muscle tissue for reasons repeated often on these pages.

Plant-based eating does wonders for people’s health. However, it is also true that eating the right meat in the appropriate quantities is good for human health too. It’s a biological fact that early hominids started eating meat 2.6-million years ago and this fuelled much of our evolution into the whining, dogmatists we are today.