Screening Snacks

About 40 people attended a film screening that created buzz for the movie “Forks Over Knives” coming to theaters March 11. The event was held in North San Diego County and organized by Janice Stanger, author of The Perfect Formula Diet, and a few other plant-based nutrition fans.

Before the movie, we dined on fresh fruits, collard wraps with hummus, veggies and mint leaves, and more, and heard about the Feb. Holistic Holiday at Sea- A Voyage to Well-Being Caribbean cruise at which Dr. T. Colin Campbell, one of the main experts featured in the movie, will lecture.

“Forks Over Knives” follows the lives of vegan nutrition researchers Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, and shows how they and other experts bring people from disease to greatly improved health through dietary changes. The major diseases of our time, such as diabetes, cancer, and hypertension, can be reduced and reversed by moving from animal-based and processed foods to a whole foods, plant-based diet. With one in five 4-year-olds obese today, this is no laughing matter. As they say in the movie, the solution is so straightforward it is mind-boggling we haven’t looked at it — “the answer is spinach.”

One doctor in the movie said “If it walked, slithered . . . had a Mom and Dad . . . don’t eat it.”

The movie had a great global perspective and many state of the art 3-D graphics and historical clips on how we got to where we are today food-wise. The 50s era brought TV dinners and convenience foods, after which cancer deaths began rising. We have continued going overboard with pleasure-seeking, i.e. eating ice cream and hamburgers, leading us to a low-grade food addiction.

Films and events such as these show how far the vegan movement has come, but we still have major shifts to make in our collective thinking. Instead of using pills as damage control for improper eating, vegan nutrition offers a preventative and enjoyable lifestyle approach. As the Obamas demonstrate with their veggie garden, and as Hippocrates famously said over 2,000 years ago, “Let food by thy medicine.”