The Game Changers is a documentary on Netflix about the optimal human diet. It came out in 2018 but I hadn’t heard about it until this year. Recently I started hearing and seeing more and more people mentioning it so I decided to check it out on Netflix.
We’re introduced to James Wilks, an “elite Special Forces trainer and The Ultimate Fighter Winner”. Essentially he’s been training in martial arts his whole life until he seriously injures his knees. During his recovery he begins researching methods in an effort to speed up the process. He comes to the conclusion that a plant-based diet is the superior way to eat for not just recovery, but for performance and health.
This is the premise of the film. Want to recover better? Eat a plant-based diet. Want to be as fit as you can? Eat a plant-based diet. Want to have optimal health? Eat a plant-based diet.
Let me say clearly: I am not against a plant-based diet. I am not against a plant-based diet. I am not against a plant-based diet.
If you choose to eat vegan for ethical reasons, that’s your choice. As a matter of fact, however you choose to eat is your choice.
Wilks profiles several people in the documentary. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the most famous among them. But there are also a track athlete, an Olympic bicyclist, an ultra distance runner, and strong-man competitor. Each of them claims that switching to a plant-based diet is the primary reason their performances improved.
There are college athletes whose blood-test results show a marked difference when they go from eating meat to eating vegan. College kids, even the athletes, are not usually thought of as people with ideal diets to begin with.
Every documentary has a point of view, a message the creator wants to express to the audience. That’s part of what makes them interesting. A film that is strictly a list of data without any interpretation or conclusions drawn would be boring.
The lesson we’re supposed to learn from this is that eating meat is unnecessary, unhealthy, unethical, and unnatural. The best diet for humans is a vegan one.
I am not against a plant-based diet. I am not against a plant-based diet. I am not against a plant-based diet.
I will stipulate to the argument that the standard American diet isn’t very healthy. I don’t think that’s a hard sell. There’s a ton of low-quality, calorie-dense food marketed to us constantly. It’s cheaper than more nutrient-dense, more ethically raised food.
Essentially, in the US we eat far too much food that is more convenient than healthy. That’s not news. The average American could definitely stand to consume less fast food and include a lot more fruits and vegetables.
The Game Changers suggests that we shouldn’t include meat in our diets at all. Again, it’s your choice. If it’s for ethical reasons, those are absolutely personal, and there’s no need to compromise there.
The idea that plant-based eating is ideal for health, strength, recovery, and longevity is certainly not proven science. Should you eat plenty of vegetables and fruits daily? Absolutely. They are good for you.
The documentary doesn’t go into a high level of detail about the diets of these high performers before they switched to eating plant-based. If you go from eating burgers, fries, soda, and ice cream to a plant-based diet, you will no doubt improve your health and performance.
They make the claim that eating even a little meat, fish, or fowl raises inflammation within your body. That for this reason, getting your protein from plants is better. Wilks even goes so far to imply that the reason Conor McGregor lost his MMA fight to Nate Diaz is primarily because the former ate meat during his training prior to the event and the latter didn’t.
That’s a significant oversimplification. Could it be a factor? Certainly. But it’s unreasonable to assume that was the main difference in the outcome.
Wilks says that scientific analysis of the remains of gladiators from ancient Rome reveals they ate a plant-based diet. It was from one area, so even if this is true, it doesn’t prove how widespread the practice was. And it doesn’t speak to its effectiveness.
The weakest part of the documentary is when they try to argue that humans are herbivores through evolution. They say our teeth are designed to grind and mash food similarly to ruminant animals (like cattle). Humans don’t have the knife-like teeth that lions do. Nor do we have the short digestive tract that predatory animals do.
It sounds convincing at first.
It’s true humans don’t have prominent canines like lions. It’s true our digestive tracts are longer. A longer tract means more time for our system to extract nutrients before excretion.
However, humans are not cattle. Their digestive tracts are far longer than ours. They have multiple stomachs with which to break down food. They eat all day long. If it’s true we’re ill equipped to take down an antelope in the plains and eat it raw, it’s equally true we could subsist on grass.
Humans are omnivores. We have evolved to be able to extract nutrients from both plants and animals. The specious reasoning that our teeth are proof we are herbivores falls apart when you remember that humans do one thing to food that no other creatures seem to: we cook. In its simplest terms, cooking our food makes it easier to chew and digest.
Human teeth did not evolve to eat raw meat, but they’re more than capable of handling it when it’s cooked. The same is true for our digestive systems.
The Game Changers misleads the audience by saying they’re disproving a widely-held belief that protein is the key to athletic performance. It’s subtle, but they twist the common view that protein is essential for building strength to appear that it’s essential for sports performance. They do this just so they can debunk it and say that you can fuel your athletic performance on a plant-based diet.
No one who’s knowledgeable would say that an athlete fuels his performance on protein. Most athletes understand that it’s carbohydrates not protein that are the energy source for performance. Have you ever heard the term “carb loading”? Or seen someone eat a ton of pasta the day before a race? Now, have you ever heard of “protein loading”? Exactly.
Please don’t misunderstand, protein is vital. But it’s not for performance. Protein works to allow your body to build, repair, and maintain tissue - particularly muscle. That’s where it works its magic: recovery.
Wilks makes it seem as if tons of people are trying to build up their energy stores through protein when it’s just not the case.
It’s fine to highlight elite performers and discuss their training and nutrition. That’s interesting stuff. When you show an Olympic athlete and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the things they do aren’t necessarily applicable to most people. Arnold talks about how he used to eat 15 eggs and 250 grams of protein a day. Granted, that was back when he was training for bodybuilding competitions, long before he switched to vegan. But does that sound like anything applicable in your life?
Elite athletes can do amazing things. They push limits and set records in the realm of human performance. That is not 99.99% percent of us. They train several hours a day and eat literally 2-3 times the amount of calories a normal person does. Just because something works for them doesn’t mean it’s what we should do.
The main premise of The Game Changers is mostly sound, I just believe it’s extreme. Most Americans (including me) would see better outcomes in health, strength, recovery, and longevity if we ate more vegetables and fruits and less meat. This is particularly true for highly-processed meat.
The typical American diet is on one end of a spectrum: lots of highly-processed foods, tons of sugar, and caffeine. The Game Changers recommends one on the other end: totally plant based.
You don’t have to eat in an extreme way in order to live a long, healthy, strong, active life. You can be somewhere in the middle. You don’t have to give up meat, fish, or fowl (unless you want to). You should include plenty of vegetables and fruits.
All in all, The Game Changers is worth a watch. If nothing else, it’s inspiring to see people doing incredible athletic feats, even if you don’t have any desire to be an ultra runner, a strong man, or an MMA champion. Just understand that the people featured have a viewpoint. It may be perfectly valid for them. But it doesn’t mean that their path is the one true path for everyone.
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