FAT: A Documentary

They were all in agreement about what

we could do for Charlie, what the treatment

options were, there was drugs,

and there was brain surgery

and you're out of luck, and so,

It was a while ago but ,

So Charlie was born March 11th, 1992,

and he had a pretty normal first year

and then right around his first birthday a little before his first birthday

I was actually pushing him in a swing one day

and he kind of threw his arm up in the air

and twitched his head a little bit

and I didn't even think much of it

and I asked my wife Nancy, I said,

have you seen anything like that

and she said yeah, I've seen a bunch of it,

So that was the beginning and we

started seeing neurologists,

Okay, Charlie, okay,

The seizures increased in intensity

and in duration, he wound up having seizures

in the arms of the Chief of pediatric Neurology

at Boston Children's Hospital, Seattle

Children's Hospital, UCLA, LA Children's Hospital

so we tried all the drugs that were available

at the time, Charlie had a brain surgery

a horrendous brain surgery and nothing

really stopped his seizures and we lost hope

we were basically told there was no hope,

And one day after the visit, I stopped

at the Medical Library, As soon as I started researching

pediatric epilepsy, one of the first things

that came up was a ketogenic diet

and was kinda shocking to me because

what it said was, uh, that about a third

of the kids with epilepsy as bad as Charlie

um, who go on a ketogenic diet have

their seizures go away, and another third

are significantly improved, and for a third

it doesn't work, and yet all of these folks

that we had taken Charlie to see

never mentioned a word about diet,

Nutrition information can be so confusing and as advanced as we are medically

and scientifically, the question remains what foods should we eat to achieve good health?

We're in a war for information

and the fallout affects all of us,

The media's just gonna sell what

people are gonna buy and if people

knew the truth, they would know what to ask for,

My name is Vinnie Tortorich and I've been

in the health and fitness game

for the better part of 40 years,

specializing in weight loss,

Over the years, I've seen everything come and go

at least a hundred times, but as a country,

we've only gotten fatter,

What should I eat, what pills should I take,

should I take a pill, what about those protein shakes?

We all know someone who's trying to lose weight

and most of those people don't realize

simply losing weight doesn't mean good health,

My mother, for instance, she was always

on some diet, one week it was the Cambridge Diet

the next week it was the Scarsdale diet,

the next week it was the Cabbage Soup diet,

But wait a minute, the next week

she ate nothing but bananas,

Where did that come from?

I always wonder about things like eight,

eight ounce glasses of water per day,

Really, where did that come from?

High blood pressure, your doctor will say

oh, you have high blood pressure,

stop drinking coffee, really?

These are all just myths,

The myths have become ingrained

in our society far too strongly

for people to realize they're myths,

What are some of the health myths we hear every day?

Grains are good for you and fat is bad for you,

Obesity is an energy balance disorder,

Calorie in, calorie out,

Calories in, calories out

as long as you're burning enough calories,

you can ingest whatever you want,

That you have to exercise to have better health,

Saturated fat is the cause of heart disease,

A low fat diet is a healthy diet,

We saw fat in the coronary arteries

and that must come from ingested fat,

A growing number of doctors are learning

that almost everything we're taught about nutrition is wrong,

And I realize there was this incredible story

that we had gotten it pretty much

completely upside down and backward on fat,

Believe it or not, the story of how we got to where we are today, started in

the 1860s, with the Seventh-day Adventist Church

and a woman named Ellen White,

Ellen was a higher up in the church

and she would have these premonitions

and one night she had a dream, that God came to her

and said that we shouldn't eat anything

-with a face, - I was taken to another place

high above this world and I

I-- I heard a voice,

There started modern-day veganism,

It really didn't exist before then, there were other religious groups

who were more vegetarian, they would eat eggs

and dairy and so on and so forth

and as a matter of fact, God also told her

that coffee and tea were bad, which made no sense

because both of those are vegetation,

Not long after in our history, there was

a man named Vilhjalmur Stefansson,

He also believed, to a certain extent

that a vegetable heavy diet was mandatory

for good health, he was an explorer

who ended up living with Inuits in Canada in 1906 and in that time and place

he was forced to adopt a new diet due to the lack of options,

He made a discovery that will change the way you look at food,

Now this raises the whole question of food, then,

You yourself must have longed for a green

-vegetable once in a while, - Well, I did at first,

At first his preconceived notion is

I'm gonna die, there is nothing green here,

There is no vegetation, they simply

eat fish and drink water,

It was unlike anything that he'd experienced, right?

Completely unlike the Western diet,

it was probably 70 to 80% fat, the Inuit lived

half the year on caribou

And half the year on whatever they could fish out of the sea,

For four and a half months, I lived on literally nothing but fish and water

and at the end of four and a half months, I was healthier than I'd ever been before,

And this is on an exclusive meat diet?

That was exclusive fish in this case,

On this diet, they were perfectly healthy,

I mean, Stefansson was somebody from

the medical world and he knew what cancer

looked like, he knew what heart disease looked like

and he did not see anyone suffering

from ill health in that community,

When he came back to the United States,

no one believed him, of course,

what, people eating nothing but meat and fat,

how could that be, they certainly would die,

Dr, Charles Norris, Chief Medical Examiner

does not approve of an all meat diet,

We have a weakness of not learning

from the natives, but rather teaching them,

You see everything through the colored spectacles

of your education, your bringing up,

We go through this whole idea of green good

red bad, Greenpeace, a light turns green

it means go, eat your greens, yet when you look

at red, well red means stop, blood is red,

it doesn't take long for media to pick up

on these thing and we don't realize it's happening

but it's happening right in front of us,

It's 10 p.m. do you know where

your children are?

Back to Ellen White and her visions,

Ellen was having these premonitions

and all of this was happening, the rioting's

were happening, in the mid-1860s,

but ten years earlier in 1856, a 12 year old boy

came to work with the church, his family

was in a church and that was John Kellogg,

John, by the time he was 16, was writing

and putting out literature for the church,

He would go on to share some of the most bizarre

beliefs that Ellen White and the church had

including the idea that masturbation

and sex were off limits,

Excuse me, Ricky,

To stave off these sins of the flesh,

you should never eat meat because meat

increases sexual desire, Well, this is what

eventually led to Cornflakes,

That's right, Cornflakes were created

by Seventh-day Adventists to curb sexual desires,

He was the guy who figured out something

that he termed dextrinization, it's when

you cook down grains so much it turns

into dextrose, it turns into a sugar,

Today when you see dextrose in a product

you should run in the opposite direction,

It's as bad as seeing high-fructose corn syrup,

It's used for bacon, it's used in salami,

all the luncheon meats that you get

includes dextrose nowadays because

it gives it a shelf life, it's a way

to cure it fast, it's cheap, it's easy to do

so something that John Kellogg started

way back in the day has also seeped

across to the other side, into the meat industry,

There are two issues, there's always

multiple questions, one is if you switch from

a standard American diet of processed foods

and sugary beverages and, you know, for lack