February 2, 2015

5 Food and Health Documentaries That Will Change Your Life

It's February! How are everyone's New Year's resolutions going? In miserable Syracuse it is snowing about a foot an hour so I plan on hibernating until Spring Break. You may have seen my post a few days ago about how Vegucated kicked my butt into green eating gear. If you're snowed in too, check out my round up of Netflix's best food and health documentaries. If you were straying from any resolutions these films are all so incredible and inspiring to keep you on track!

1. Super Size Me
  
Super Size Me is a nutrition documentary classic and the perfect gateway film to start your health movie binge. This fast paced film will leave you shocked, horrified, and somehow still craving French fries. This film uncovers some seriously disturbing secrets of America’s agricultural, meatpacking, and fast food industries that will leave you wondering if anything has changed since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. 

2. Vegucated
Veganism can get a bad rap. Popular media can make it easy to assume that being vegan consists of eating tofu and hugging trees, but Vegucated takes an honest and unpretentious look at a vegan lifestyle. Vegucated follows three die-hard NYC meat lovers who agree to go vegan for six weeks. Documenting that yes, it can be frustrating to not be able to find a vegan option on a dinner menu, but that overall a vegan lifestyle is a healthy and possibly necessary option for a greener planet. 
 
3. Food Inc.
Did you know that the modern supermarket has on average 47,000 products? Or that the average American eats of 200 pounds of meat per year? Food Inc. has 94 minutes worth of facts that will have you rattling the dinner table. While Super Size Me will show you the horrors of the fast food industry, Food Inc. takes a close look at the ethics behind your daily groceries like fruit and vegetables.

4. GMO OMG
GMO, USDA, CDC, what the heck do these even mean? By the end of this film you’ll not only know, but you’ll be carefully checking the label of everything in your fridge for these little letters. GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism and unfortunately; the little buggers are in almost every non-organic food—OMG!

5. TEDTalks: Chew On This – Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish: Teach Every Child About Food
OK, this isn’t really a documentary but what chef (and self-proclaimed superhero) Jamie Oliver has to say is important. At the rate America is eating, today’s children will live, on average, 10 years less than their parents. But Oliver is hopeful that with a little education, this all can change. Diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States today and he wants to put an end to it by educating Americans on why what your putting into your body is the one of the most important decisions that you can make.

*This article was originally written for What the Health Magazine @ https://whatthehealthmag.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/5-food-and-health-documentaries-that-will-change-your-life/