Hey, what’s going on guys and gals? Thanks for tuning in. We featured this content as the first episode of the Karnivore Kurt podcast, so we also wanted to transcribe and make it available as a blog post if you prefer that type of medium! Super excited to have you all here. We’ve been creating and producing content on YouTube for about three months and it’s been a journey. It’s been a lot of fun learning about all the content. We thought for this episode we would go over the recent very popular film that’s out on Netflix called The Game Changers. It was produced by James Cameron and his wife, and it’s got some pretty big names behind the production of it. Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, just to name a few. And in the video on YouTube, the podcast – and now blog post, we basically break down 13 pretty big lies that are in the film. And yeah, I think it’s going to be a really good way for you to sort of dive in and just get some more information.So without further ado…
Welcome to 13 reasons why The Game Changers film LIES. We’re going to jump through 13 reasons here. I think there’s clearly some evidence that can be stated around why this film is really probably misleading…
So number one, James and Susie Cameron – these are the producers of the film. James Cameron is actually a heavy investor in Verdient Foods, which is an organic pea protein creator. He set a public goal to make it the largest pea protein company in North America. So right off the bat we know that the producer of the film is a vegan and he’s also made a major investment in a vegan company. This kind of leads us down this rabbit hole. So the film was pretty entertaining, but I would say that’s probably all it is.
So the second reason why this is a lie is James Wilkes, who’s a UFC fighter, takes us on a journey throughout the film. In one of the beginning sort of anecdotes, he talks about the gladiators and how the gladiators were these warriors, the greatest warriors of all time, and they primarily ate a plant based diet.
It’s kind of funny because I don’t think anyone’s debating that humans for our ancestry of of roughly 20 years, we took in some plants from time to time and that we did evolve from the apes and the primates and they were clearly herbivores. But it’s kind of funny because he uses this anecdote of gladiators and says, Hey, these guys ate a lot of plants. We must be vegan. There’s no reason for us to eat meat. They were clearly the best warriors in the world, so we should be warriors. Then he goes on to mention this compound, this molecule called strontium, which is very similar to calcium. And what’s actually kind of mortifying is that this compound has been has been approved in Europe to treat women with osteoporosis. What they found and what the American Bone Health Organization has has seen in studies is that the individuals given strontium had a significant increase in both heart attack and blood clotting compared to the the control group that did not get strontium.
So to say that strontium is this like miracle chemical is just crazy. And when it doesn’t take much, you can literally just Google it and ask if it’s safe and you’ll find results and you’ll be able to research this yourself. So to open a movie, talking about gladiators and how this compound strontium is like so much better for people – it’s whack!
Reason number three is partly kind of embedded throughout the movie, but towards, I’d say about two thirds in there are anthropologists and sort of biologists talking about the human body. And this is where I kind of really sort of start to question the validity of what they’re saying. But the idea here is that our biology supports us being animals that do not eat meat(crazy!). So they claim that vitamin C, which we cannot get from anything except for plants and our longer intestinal tracks three, four or five times longer than typical carnivores indicate to them (as well as our teeth..our molars, being not as incisive in terms of ripping and cutting and shredding meat) being that we don’t, we’re not intended to eat meat.
The argument here though is that I don’t think that humans necessarily can’t eat plants, but we thrive with animal foods and they’re trying to stay that we don’t eat animal foods and we shouldn’t eat animal foods and they’re not healthy for us, which is crazy. First of all, from a biological perspective, and I’m going to do spoiler alert, a video on this probably next, the next video about our ancestry and why I think we’re largely carnivorous. We evolved about 20 million years ago and it was about 2.6 million years ago when we had the last ice age. We’re just now coming out of during ice ages. And what we saw historically, the amount of plants on the ground that we were able to access were limited because of the weather and the change in the, this sort of environment.
And we really became these sort of scavengers. This is what the anthropological evidence suggests that we became scavengers. We created tools and we were able to crack into carcasses and really dig into the brains. And the marrow of the bones left from predators weren’t big enough and strong enough to really chase down or hunt these big animals early in our evolution. But what we see from a biological perspective is that the humans became these upright creatures that were no longer spending the majority of their time hanging from trees. Our guts are our, basically our colons, shrunk down, which is a primary area in our large intestine where you can ferment fiber to produce fat and actually process it. Our colons shrunk to about a quarter of the size of what they are in apes, our ancestors, and our brains quadrupled in size to what they have.
What’s interesting also is our guts, the acidity or guts went from what you see pretty much across the board with herbivores of a seven to eight pH on the scale down to a high, high acidity of below a two where typical carnivores are two to three. And so from a biological perspective, we develop these guts that seems consistent as a highly acidic gut that would destroy the bacteria and pathogens from the scavenged morsels of meat animal foods. We were eating at that time as homo habilis. Now there’s obviously speculation in Game Changers. They interviewed anthropologists. One of the guys was like the director of anthropology from Harvard, which was just blowing my mind because if you look and you read all this research and you and you kind of do some of your own digging and you look at the biology, it just doesn’t make sense that our biology would evolve.
Why on earth would nature have made our guts this acidic? No herbivore has this level of acidity in their gut and yet the the evidence and what we see, we develop these tools where we could break open bones, we could get into the skulls and our brains exploded in size. Our guts shrunk down in terms of the length of our digestive tract and then our acidity went way, way up. Like all of this is consistent with the idea that we moved from a primarily herbivore ancestry to a much more carnivore ancestry. And most people will say we’re omnivores. I would say we’re probably facultative carnivores, meaning we primarily ate animal foods because of the ice age and the forcing of how we evolved and, and how beneficial and how bioavailable the nutrients are when you look at the scale. But then we essentially moved to where we could handle plants, but we, we didn’t look at them as the primary fuel source. So we’re very intelligently designed. We can eat plants, but we don’t use them as our primary fuel source.
So there’s a scene, and this is the fourth reason why the film is a lie, where they take three football players, I think they’re all from the Miami Dolphins, and they give them a meal. The first meal they give them is animal protein. The second meal is all plant protein. They basically take their blood after these meals, postprandial, which means basically the, the hour or two after you eat a meal. It’s not a fasted state. Instead it’s a fed state and your body’s probably circulating the nutrients in the blood and things like that. And they looked at the blood and what they found was that the subjects when they had the animal meal and they looked at their, their tubes, I assume what they were, were sort of showing in this, this doctor was, was outlining is that the triglycerides, the amount of sort of cholesterol and fat molecules in their bloodstream was elevated and it was much higher when they’re in the animal food diet versus the plant food diet.
Now, people have done this before and I personally have done my labs on an entirely animal-based diet where I’ve pulled my fast to triglycerides and we know postprandial. It can be very variable. It depends on how much calories you take in, what the macro content is, what’s in the food. It’s just crazy to think that you would, you would pull something two hours after you eat it and expect to get kind of the metabolic picture of what your overall health is because there is so much going on there. But for the purpose of this experiment, the other thing the football players mentioned was they ate Popeye’s chicken. Well, if you know anything about Popeye’s chicken, it’s fried chicken in vegetable oils, canola. I looked this up, it’s canola and I think it was like GrapeSEED oil. Basically very inflammatory oils is what they’re eating.
And so to come here and showcase, Oh, you eat this as an animal burrito and then this happens to your blood. But Oh by the way, you might’ve had some fried food and some vegetable oils that are very inflammatory and things that we know are probably contributing to unhealthy lifestyles, but we’re not going to take that in consideration and we’re going to pull this postprandial and just compare. So it’s just not good science and it’s very much skewed and looked at. And going like, what? Like why are you, first of all, if you want to be convincing, you have to at least come off somewhat like you’re not biased. And in this film you’re just going down this hole of like, okay, this is a make sense. This doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense.
So reason number five is around this whole picture where like one of the guys shows a picture of an artery at the New York fire department and he’s like, this is what your, your endothelial function will look like if you eat animal foods and this is what it’ll look like when you don’t. And then he goes on throughout the movie and shows guys how they lowered their cholesterol. And I gotta be honest, like after doing my own research, looking at the Cholesterol Code, Dave Feldman, Carnivore, MD, Frank Tofano, you know, all these people are really intelligent to me live a lifestyle that is very healthy and have done a lot more research than your average doctor and are looking at the real science that’s going on right now. Cholesterol is not the enemy. Maybe the indicator at the scene, but for most of us, you need cholesterol in your body and having high cholesterol, especially if you’re on a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet, is not going to be an issue.
This is something where you need to look further, and I can even testify to this because if you go back and look at my blood results and you look at the endothelial function in my blood results, six months of animal foods only, you’re going to see that my endothelial function is very good. It’s very healthy. We see typically very low inflammation markers for people on a carnivore diet and in the community we see a lot of reduction in inflammation and autoimmune because of that reduction. So this fifth reason is just a flat out lie. There’s just not a lot of evidence there and there’s really not a lot of things that we can look at to say this is an issue.
So the 6th sort of reason why this film was a lie in my opinion is, is there’s this point where they show how Nate Diaz, who is apparently training with a vegan diet, gets set to fight Conor McGregor, who’s the defending featherweight champion of UFC and now stepping into the lightweight class and going for that championship, and I believe he had won the championship at the time and was now defending the championship.
But the point is Connor is all about steaks, all about eating his meat and Nate is all about his vegan diet and all that. And I don’t even know if Nate’s really that big of a proponent of the diet, but they basically go on to explain how Nate won the fight because he was on a vegan diet and Connor lost the fight because he was on a meat diet. And a couple of things right off the bat, right? This is one data point. There is very little evidence to support that the diet itself was the main factor in winning. But more importantly, Connor was stepping up an entire weight class from what he traditionally fought at – for anybody in fighting at any level that is insanely hard to do. And he did it. And probably the hardest sort of element UFC where he basically went from featherweight to fighting people that were much bigger his size.
Nate Diaz is substantially bigger person than Conor McGregor. And he fought him well, he didn’t obviously win, but he did a good job of at least showing up. So to me it’s kind of a lie because they take this picture of a famous incidents and they go, all right, well clearly this must be what’s going on. And the real reason for this is because of the plant protein.
So number seven reason is, is really just crazy. Wilkes is talking about how cows milk can be estrogenic and reduce your testosterone. And he’s referring to a pediatric journal study where they had 18 adults drinking pregnant cow milk and I believe it was seven men in that study had temporarily reduced their testosterone. Wilkes stated this as like it was the gold standard as if this was actually what’s going on, like come on man. Like you got to at least be honest with your audience. So again, this is just crazy.
Another study, this is the 8th point, is that that Wilkes cited how postprandial, so after you eat a meal, avocados were reducing the inflammation and improving markers of endothelial function. Basically the inside of the veins and arteries, it was improving the markers that those were healthier. If people had an avocado with their burger, with I think with their steak, whatever. It was basically proving it. What’s funny, and this is true even for the meat world in the carnival community, obviously there are studies funded by meat organizations, but in this study it was actually done by the Haas avocado organization. So again, and it’s like you’re pulling a study from the organization that’s actually funding it. We know especially in the pharmaceutical industry, a lot of the studies, the trials are done clinically are funded by those pharmaceutical companies and the results are heavily skewed to favor the affects of the actual pharmaceuticals.
When in reality, when they’re unbiased, the research, oftentimes these studies are completely bullshit. They’re not real, they’re not accurate, and they are actually misleading and dangerous.
So in Point 9, they argue about protein quality and they say that animal advocates have basically stated that you must eat animal foods because you cannot get the essential amino acids in a complete protein, which would include all that. I would say that that’s pretty valid. What they say in the argument is that the actual, that’s not true, that you can actually get all the essential amino acids from plants if you eat a combination of plants. There’s also some truth that if you eat soy, which has a whole slew of other health concerns for a lot of people around estrogen and what it can do for your hormones, you would get a complete stack of essential amino acids.
But what’s crazy is that the most bioavailable forms of complete essential amino acids in the amounts that your body readily accepts that you need as a human being, you’re going to get those from animal foods. Whey protein, beef are some of the highest forms of that. If you look at plants – there’s an actual actual categorization that was created. It’s the PDCAAS which means the “Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score”. The top foods on there are animal based without question. One of the other ones, surprise is pea protein. So if you look at it, it’s like whey protein at a score of 1.0 which is perfect. Casein, which is like a 1.0 beef is like 0.92 and then pea protein is like 0.86 but all the other plants are like way down the list.
Soy is a little bit up there, but then it’s like the next closest thing is like 0.56 so in order to really get the complete protein stack of all the essential amino acids, your body actually needs to build muscle and is the key building block for you? You have to eat animal foods. It’s, it’s just there’s no way around them.
So they’re going into like ancient discussions here on point 10 and they’re now bringing up stuff that has been debunked for probably at least five years, if not 10 years. This idea of colon cancer and red meat causing it. So there were some studies done and what we found was that colon cancer did increase with the ingestion of processed and cured meats. But what’s funny is your overall all cause chance of getting colon cancer is about 5%. These studies they did showed that your increase of getting the colon cancer went up on that actual risk factor 17% when you extrapolate out the relative risk, the actual risk change that you get when you eat processed meats, it’s only a 1% difference. It’s like you could eat bacon, salami, pastrami, and your chance of actually dying from colon cancer went from 5% to 6%. So the film just explodes this out and says, Hey, this is like a major issue. Like watch out. This could really cause a big thing. They leave these facts and these these information points in a way where it’s super misleading and it’s dangerous to people. It’s really not smart and it’s concerning.
Another example of this where they just blow facts out of the water is the 11th reason or lie – they try to say you could get more antioxidants in a wedge of iceberg lettuce than you would in salmon. It was like salmon or eggs. And it’s like, okay, so if we’re looking at at exactly that, if we’re looking at just the antioxidant content, maybe that exists, but what about the DHA, the acid that your brain absolutely needs to function, that you get from salmon and you don’t get that at all from the lettuce or the choline you get in the eggs, which is critical for your brain health and your gallbladder and your production of bile, salts and all these other important metabolic functions. It’s like you’re comparing apples to oranges. It’s just a stupid claim. It has no basis in nutrition and it’s just, it makes me laugh.
So the 12th point, the 12th reason why I think Game Changers film is a lie… Is this heart disease idea, that animal foods, animal protein in particular is a risk factor if you’re eating a lot of that for heart disease andAncel Keys came out in the seventies and eighties and really scared the shit out of everybody and said that, Hey, don’t eat saturated fat. Red meat will kill you…. And we know that that’s not true. We’ve done numerous studies now showing that that is not true. It is fiction. It is not accurate. What we do think might be the case is the particle size of cholesterol, certain higher density particles in your body,like chunks of cholesterol can correlate with this. But again, it’s still getting figured out in the research that we’re looking at. It’s really still up in the air. We do know for sure though it is not because of animal protein and earlier on in my point, we actually need animal protein for the most part because we need the complete essential amino acids.
The last point I want to mention, which is just a cherry on top of this whole already cherry-picked studies and statements and blown out of proportion things is this idea that our body needs glucose. And I can tell you right now, I have been living without ingesting glucose for almost a year now on the carnivore diet in a ketogenic fashion, and I’ve done my blood work four times now. I will see my results, the fourth blood work and be putting out on the channel very soon. But in all three of those other cases, I have not died. I have energy. I can think clearly. I can read, I have mental cognition. I don’t think the creators of this film were that familiar with ketone bodies because they completely forgot to mention that yes, you can actually run on ketones.
So that was a lot of information. I as always tried to break it down and keep it as concise as possible. I’d love to hear your comments. As mentioned towards the top – this content was originally on my Youtube channel that we also wanted to put out in podcast/blog form so if you prefer listening or watching please check those out also! Below are links to where you can find all our great content!