Hi Pete,

Thanks for the interest in this article. Your question is a very fair one. I have absolutely no ties to any interested parties at all. I currently DO NOT work for the food industry in any capacity.

I also don’t support industrialised farming in any way except that I buy some food from those systems when I fail to organise myself (from the supermarket). Normally, I buy direct from farmers in my local area (Bavaria) that raise their pigs and cows in a pastured system.

Nor will I ever represent industrialised farming because my beliefs are that they are as detached from real food and sustainable systems like the vegan movement.

Industrialised animal ag and conventional crop ag are both bad for the environment and soil. I support neither.

I support wholeheartedly the regenerative farming system which centres itself around restoring soil and, in my opinion, is a vital part of our future food systems.

I understand your motivation to go vegan, as much as I can, and fully support it.

However, my own motivation as ‘anti-this movie’ and the modern vegan movement for the most part, is that I have yet to be impressed with a single study. Most represented are from population based studies and don’t show eating nothing but plants is helpful. Not even close.

The producers are misrepresenting so many studies to further their own interests as far as I can tell.

James Cameron has an $140m stake (there was a meat joke in there but I decided against it) in the pea protein industry which means he is absolutely not objective.

Also, executive producer Lewis Hamilton, has a vested interest in his chain of vegan restaurants.

I also find it really insulting they’re trying to muddy the anthropological and archaeological evidence as to the role of meat in our history.

Also the physiological evidence.

I really don’t mind people eating anyway they like, but when large vested interests start trying to lie about our history that really angers me.

I feel that the vegan diet is not human appropriate. It must be supplemented, which is not addressed in the movie. Nor even hinted at. All of their anecdotes are stories that in very large part are supported by supplements. Yet we are told throughout that this can all be achieved by “eating plants”.

As a nutritionist I use supplements all the time but my goal is to find a diet that works for people that doesn’t involve them. Or at the least, not in such a large part and not forever.

I worry about the most impressionable in our society, kids mainly. They won’t appreciate the difficulty of nourishing themselves without animals and they will become ill. Much of that, I suspect, will be mental illness overlooked their doctors.

Let’s hope I’m wrong about that. Normally, people’s instincts take over and they go back to an omnivorous diet (84% for health reasons according to Hal & Herzog, the year escapes me).

I wish you all the best, I really do. I hope you are supplementing well and take time making all of those foods that are so necessary on the vegan diet more digestible and therefore nourishing.

I highly recommend taking a multivitamin with bio-available forms of B vitamins especially (this is important). Also, sprouting and fermenting some of your legumes, nuts and seeds etc is a powerful way of making them better foods.

Tim

ps: I highly respect your choice of career.