The Hilariously Wrong Vegan Documentary: The Game Changers

Now you may be wondering. Why is an anime blogger posting about a vegan documentary? My answer to you:

With the CoronaVirus, I’ve been watching random stuff on Netflix. The other day, I watched the documentary, “The Game Changers”, a relatively popular documentary on netflix which discusses the ‘plant eating diet’.

It is definitely not because I had a quick school assignment, and did not want to write a blog post this week. Definitely not. No way

——– warning: this post is filled with 5 minute research, and you probably shouldn’t trust it. i am an idiot with no degree, no prior knowledge in this area, and my opinion should not be taken seriously ——-

This documentary is actually pretty funny if you consider the ways in which it’s just outright wrong, which you’ll find from just a bit of research on the web. For example, they say that a peanut butter sandwich has just as much protein as a 3oz beef, but that would require literally ¼ cup of peanut butter.

If that doesn’t convince you to watch this, I would like you to know that there is a section in this movie where they discuss how eating plants make your erection better.

But for now, I’d just like to talk about the documentary and its problems.

The documentary pushes the idea that plant eating diets are much more effective in helping people for exercise, and strongly suggests that it is the superior diet to a meat based diet. It attempts to debunk many ideas within society of the benefits of meat diets and negatives of plant eating diets. 

One of the things that is deeply covered within this documentary is the poor knowledge that many people have about meat eating diets. There are undoubtedly many benefits to eating plants over meat, and eating sufficient amounts of plants and not overwhelming your system with meat is definitely a good idea, however, as this documentary mentions, many professional teams eat many steaks a day and treat themselves to junk food right before real matches

The film pushes the importance of diet on human’s physical performance. However, this film puts too much importance on the diet, and has a lack of focus on anything else.

There is a section in the documentary in which various athletes are given a meat burrito first and have their blood tested, then have a bean burrito the next day and have their blood tested again. In this test, they put the blood in a centrifuge to see the plasma within the blood easily. The point of this test was to demonstrate that one meat meal can impair blood flow, and that endothelium functions less well after a meat meal. Of course, the results of the test in the documentary show that the bean burrito was much more helpful. 

However, the documentary does not even mention other variables whatsoever,  such as sleep, medical history, training, muscle fatigue, mental clarity, emotional state and genetic predispositions. 

Furthermore, this documentary often has lots of sections where it is arguable that the problems being mentioned are not necessarily due to the people consuming meat instead of plants, but because they are consuming poor quality meat. 

There is massive misinformation and misrepresentation of facts, and man it’s hilarious if you know the context. There are many instances in the documentary where there are so many elements that are not properly shown to the audience, and only the diet is shown as the main cause of everything. One of the highlights of the film is where the fighter Conner McGregor goes against Nate Diaz. It shows McGregor constantly eating meat, and saying that he overeats meat, and strongly implies that the outcome of the fight in which Conner McGregor loses and that causes a major upset in the fighting community, is solely because of the diet. 

This is an extremely poor representation of the facts, because of many factors in this fight that were not mentioned. For example, many believe that in the first place, McGregor was a poor match to Diaz due to their conflicting fighting styles. Furthermore, Diaz was known to do much more cardio while McGregor would focus more on strength training. In addition to that, in this fight, McGregor had to go up two weight classes for this fight, meaning that there was likely a 20 to 30 pound difference between the two during the time of the fight. This is not mentioning the 11 losses that Diaz has, as well as the fact that McGregor emerged victorious in the rematch. The claim that the diet was the difference in this match is simply ridiculous, as it does not take other sources into consideration. 

Another one of the points that this documentary makes is that although people believe that we need to get protein from animals, that is actually false, and we can actually get all of the required protein from plants, and perhaps even better quality from protein. The film makes a fucking hilarious claim that ultimately the protein we get from animals and plants is the same, because the animals eat those same plants. However, there is much scientific evidence that suggests that plant protein is inferior to meat protein. 

There’s various reasons, and these are just a couple of ones I found from biolayne.com.

1. most plant proteins are far less bioavailable than animals proteins
2. most plant proteins are limiting in various essential amino acids.
3. most plant proteins are low in leucine

anyway, thanks for reading. see you next week where i will actually post anime things.