​Yesterday, Julie and I watched the long awaited movie Game Changers – a documentary about the benefits of a wholefood plant-based diet (WFPB) for athletic performance. Produced by James Cameron (he of Terminator, Titanic and Avatar fame) and featuring such plant-based luminaries as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lewis Hamilton, the film outlines the scientifically supported WFPB health advantages in a simple but never simplistic manner.

It weaves its story through James Wilks, a retired mixed martial arts fighter who is seeking to regain fitness following an injury. James gradually learns of the power of WFPB in accelerating recovery from injury, improving endurance and providing protein in the perfect quality and quantity. During his journey, he meets cutting-edge scientists and strength and endurance athletes who have gone plant-based and reaped the benefits. Most poignantly, James convinces his father to go plant-based following a heart attack. No mean feat for somebody from Melton Mowbray, world famous for its artery-clogging pork pies.

As a former athlete, and somebody who has gone fully plant-based after many years of oscillating between omnivore, vegetarian and pescatarian diets, this is a film I wish my 11 year old self had seen back in the 1970s when I was starting out in sports. The information was out there even then, but never packaged in such an accessible form. The biggest revelation to me was that my idol Ed Moses, a two-time Olympic gold medallist who was unbeaten in the 400m hurdles for eight years, had been a vegan. As a junior runner on the ‘undercard’, I used to marvel at Moses as he began his meticulous preparation for a race that was to take place in three hours – the meditation, the bewildering series of stretches and the rehearsal of every hurdle. Now I know that his quest for perfection extended to what he put in his mouth. It was a goose-bump moment for me.

I represent the converted, having read the peer-reviewed literature, and having seen and experienced the benefits of going plant-based. But there will be sceptics out there who will defend the status quo. Below are a few of the possible criticisms and my responses:

• The science is flawed, and the film is cherry picking – the science is impeccable, but it can never be perfect when looking at something as complex as diet. Plus, the funding for studies relating to plant-based nutrition has been pitiful and much of it has been industry-funded – the meat, dairy, poultry, fish and egg lobbies dwarf big-broccoli. And, when it comes to diet, there is only one cherry. A wholefood plant-based diet is the only diet shown to prevent, arrest and even reverse a range of common chronic diseases.
• The athletes featured were not always the world’s best, so they are being beaten by people eating animal products – this is true but look at the tiny percentage of vegans there are in sports as a whole. Then consider the likes of the Williams sisters, Novak Djokovic, and Lewis Hamilton – they are the best in the world. The important thing, as emphasised in the movie, is that the featured athletes improved their performance after going plant-based.
• Veganism may have worked for the people featured but it doesn’t work for everybody – this is a huge topic that the film only lightly touched upon. The phenomenon of the failed vegan needs a movie of its own. There are many reasons why vegan diets fail and they all come down to planning. Mic the Vegan succinctly summarises the reasons in his video - Why Vegans Fail. In the words of the American Dietetic Association “It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.”

​Some may also say that the movie was only about athletes, so its message does not apply to the 99.9% of people who are not athletes. That is not an argument worth responding to. It’s also not true. I already referred to James Wilks's father. The film also looked at New York fire fighters and anti-poaching patrollers in Zimbabwe.

Another criticism that could be levelled at the movie is that it did not cover other lifestyle areas of importance to athletic performance such as sleep and psycho-social health. Simply stated, you cannot cover everything in 84 minutes.

Without giving too much away, my second most memorable part of the movie (after the Ed Moses revelation) was the anti-poaching guy who went vegan when he realised his hypocrisy in saving animals in his work while contributing to their destruction the rest of the time.

My most memorable part? – the erection section. I will say no more; watch the movie to get the full flavour.

My one criticism of the movie was that it did not sufficiently emphasise the importance of whole plant foods, with the risk that some people might simply exchange an animal-based junk food diet for a plant-based junk food diet.

Will the Game Changers be a game changer? Not by itself, but it may help to convince people, both athletes and non-athletes, who were thinking of going plant-based but have had understandable concerns. But there is a tide and this movie makes a mighty contribution to this tide. Watch it with an open mind.

T. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and author of the ground-breaking China Study, is one of the world’s most knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate WFPB advocates, and Whole is his magnum opus. Campbell is persuasive. Reading the China Study helped to convince Bill Clinton to take up a wholefood, plant-based diet with dramatic health benefits.

At over 300 pages and at times written in fairly technical language, Whole is not a light read, but it is well worth the effort if you want to understand: the importance of wholism in nutritional science (and all science for that matter); why supplements are often ineffective at best and harmful at worst; the power of whole plant foods over medicine, and; how industry influences both dietary recommendations and the science behind these recommendations. 

The book is based on a critique of reductionism – which can be defined as a focus on the details without looking at the context – i.e. not seeing the wood for the trees. Wholism, by contrast, views the whole as greater than the sum of its parts – a molecule is not the sum of its atoms, a cell is not the sum of its constituent parts, an organ is not the sum of its cells, and so on. Campbell argues that we need both wholism and reductionism, but, since the industrial revolution the balance has swung way too far to the reductionist end of the spectrum. 

Nutritional science has been particularly influenced by successes of reductionist science such as the discovery of single vitamin deficiency diseases such as scurvy, rickets and beriberi. This has led to the idea that we require precise quantities of particular nutrients for particular physiological functions without a focus on the actual food we eat (“we eat food, not nutrients”) and the body’s ability to process this food to power a multitude of physiological functions. 

Campbell charts his personal journey from a childhood spent on his family’s dairy farm, to his early quest to ensure that children in developing countries consume more protein, to his realisation that many health problems, including cancers, are actually caused by excess animal protein, to the China Study where his team discovered that a raft of western diseases were practically unknown where people ate wholefood plant-based diets. He also documents his growing dissolution with the nutritional establishment, giving an insider’s account of how the truth about health is consistently watered down or covered up when it threatens vested interests. One caveat here. Campbell is from America, where industry lobbying is ubiquitous. Industry influence is not as extreme in many other countries. Indeed, industry representatives were excluded from the consultations used to produce Canada’s 2019 Dietary Guidelines. This, unfortunately, is not the case in most countries including UK.

The section on the nutritional establishment is interesting but, to be honest, Campbell’s experiences will probably come as no surprise. The real insight for me is his focus on the complexity of the processes whereby the body turns the food we eat into you and me. An apple, for example, famously keeps the doctor away. We have an idea of some of the reasons for this such as fibre, vitamins, minerals, and protective phytochemicals, but we have very little insight into the precise impact of the symphony orchestrated by the thousands of chemicals in an apple at any one time or in any one place as: 1) there are so many substances, and; 2) the nutrients we extract from this apple will depend on the body’s requirements in any particular moment. Our cells, organelles, organs and physiological systems are not passive sieves. It is the complexity of whole foods, the whole body that consumes them and the interactions between the two, that explains why the dominant focus on single nutrients, single genes, single biochemical pathways, and single drugs is naïve at best and destructive at worst. 

Campbell uses the classic example of vitamin A and cancer to illustrate this naivety. What most people call Vitamin A is actually a group of Vitamin A precursors - the carotenoids, famously abundant in the eponymous carrot. The carotenoids are powerful antioxidants. There are about six hundred known carotenoids in food. Studies have shown that intake of foods rich in one of these carotenoids, beta-carotene, is associated with lower rates of cancer, notably lung cancer in smokers. This led to recommendations for smokers to take beta-carotene supplements to reduce lung cancer risk. However, beta-carotene supplementation in large clinical trials actually increased lung cancer incidence and cardiovascular mortality rates. The effects were so great that the trials had to be terminated early. The precise mechanism is not known but it may be that beta-carotene from supplements is overwhelming the body’s ability to absorb the myriad other carotenoids that should be coming from food. This and other examples illustrate the foolishness of the endless quests for isolated chemicals to resolve our health issues while ignoring the context within which these chemicals weave their magic. I think the Campbell’s focus on the shortcomings of supplements is important as many in the field of complementary medicine are quick to condemn synthetic drugs while giving “natural” supplements a free pass. The supplement industry is worth billions, so invoking the “follow the money” principle, we need to examine health claims made for supplements with a vigilance many reserve only for the products of the food and drug industries. 

Campbell also focuses on reductionism in genetics, characterising genetic medicine as the ultimate reductionist fallacy, and medicine as a whole with its focus on symptoms with less attention paid to root causes.  

The book’s take-home message for me is that the body is highly intelligent and exquisitely designed to seek optimal health as far as possible in any given circumstance. So, most people will be healthy if they eat what they were designed to eat and live as naturally as possible. The exquisitely complex biochemistry of our food and our bodies interacts to ensure that we don’t need to sweat over the small details. This is empowering as it means we do not have to fixate on the quantities or proportions of nutrients we consume or obsessively count calories. Instead, we can follow Michael Pollan’s dietary manifesto to “Eat [real] foods, not too much, mostly plants.” It took 300+ pages of reading and reflection to reach that eight word conclusion!