Food Matters Documentary Quotes

I’ll admit it, I’m a food documentary geek, and Food Matters is one of my favourites. I cannot recommend this one enough. Everything we put in our body either supports our hormones or works against them. In fact everything we put in our body makes us weaker, or stronger, over time. One of my favourite quotes from Ann Wigmore is: “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.” Powerful, much? This documentary nails it in terms of the quality of food we eat and how it impacts our health.

My favourite quote from the film: “We are stuffing our faces, and we are starving.” We are starving ourselves of the nutrients that our cells require to thrive.

Are you London-based or around? We are holding an event called “Heal Your Own Body” in London on 31st July 2018 at Planet Organic. We’d love to see you there! Get your TICKETS HERE.

A Quick Pre-Story on Hormonal Imbalance

About a year ago, a guy came up to me in the co-working space I started at in LA after I did my welcome spiel and explained to everyone what I was working on. He told me that he had very low testosterone and his doctor had put him Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) and a drug for his thyroid – as they’re closely linked. He was in his early 30s and his doctor didn’t ask him anything about his diet. This made my blood boil. I did; I asked for him to describe to me a typical day. I suggested he made 4 simple changes; reduce intake of high GI carbs to avoid blood sugar spikes and the insulin surges that follow, which causes fat storage and testosterone levels to drop immediately (as well as over time causing insulin tolerance and a host of problems associated with that), swap over breakfast cereal for omelettes or eggs of some kind with veggies, up the fats (healthy type of course), to remove grains and switch to the likes of sweet potato and quinoa, and to tell me how he felt in one month. I also suggested he lifted weights twice a week, in addition to his current cardio exercise regime and only purchase organic food.

In one week – not one month – he came up to me and said “Neil, I cant’ thank you enough”. He told me he already felt he had more energy, that he had burned 4 pounds of fat (key to increase testosterone), that his libido was starting to come back, and that the tightness in his thyroid (located in your throat) had gone which he had grown used to for a year! This was mainly through diet. His doctor would have put him on 2 drugs for the rest of his life most probably, and every drug – bar none – has side effects. The big side effect for TRT is that it sends a message to your brain to stop producing testosterone naturally. People often come off it (as they experience side effects) and their energy levels plummet.

The reason I gave that example, is because this is just one example of how food can heal a health condition. We live in a culture of quick fixes where drugs are prescribed to treat the symptoms and never the cause – a ‘pill for a pill’ society, as cited in this documentary, Food Matters. Back to the matter in hand, if you don’t want to make the time to watch it, I’ve taken some notes for you. Here are my biggest takeaways in bullet point pretty much take directly from the documentary as I’ve watched it. No opinions here, just what I heard!

Food Matters Documentary Notes

• Heart disease and cancer are 2 biggest killers in the US annually
• 39,000 people die due to unnecessary surgery and errors in hospitals
• 80,000 for die to minor infections
• 106,000 die due to adverse drug reactions – prescription drugs, each year in the US.
• Heart disease = 652,486 deaths
• Cancer = 553,888 deaths
• Modern medicine = 225,000 deaths
• Optimum nutrition is the medicine of tomorrow – Dr Linus Pauling
• Let Thy Food Be Thy Medicine – Hippocrates
• Most food is 5-6 days old by the time it has reached our supermarkets, shipped from country to country, with nutrient deterioration
• Pesticides, herbicides and preservatives cause a lot of harm
• We’re eating toxic food, which is already deficient, then we cook it, losing enzymes in cooked food, even if lightly steamed
• With cooked food, immune system reacts to it like a toxin.
• Cooked food causes digestive leukocytosis – this is white blood cell activity. (Think Leukaemia)
• Food cooking process bastardises the structure of the food
• Dr Paul Kouchakoff – over 51% of our daily food intake should be in the form of raw, organic plant-based food
• Soil become deficient so plants also become deficient – lose defences. Bugs attack them so go to chemical companies to buy pesticides and fungicides etc
• Doctors and hospitals are not interested in diets
• Less than 6% of medical graduates receive any kind of nutrition training 
• 26% of patients leaving hospitals are more malnourished than when they went in
• Dr Linus Pauling 1990 – Vitamin C was found to be super effective against common cold. This was dismissed from medical profession.
• Stress causes your adrenaline to break down vitamin C!!
• Vitamins cure many problems, not just one isolated problem
• Cardiovascular disease is a lifestyle disease, which can be cured or arrested, by switching to a plant-based diet. (We get all of our micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – from plant-based food, and we’re typically all undernourished of these)
• Half of all deaths in the world are from cardiovascular disease. First symptom of cardiovascular disease is often death 
  • People can go through their whole lives with no symptoms and die suddenly
• Drugs: In the UK the number of people who die from drug reactions is about 10,000. Motor accidents – 3,500
• Prostrate cancer – 9,000 in UK
• 106,000 people in the US die from prescription drugs. These are side effects normally stated and expected – no overdoses, in 1 year. This equates to 2.4m in 23 years. In the same period 10 people died from mega dosage of vitamins. Yet doctors and the medical profession dismiss vitamins.
• How regulators operate: Governing bodies required to license drugs are paid for by drug companies. Drug companies also pay academics who are meant to be researching the drugs and they pay for the trials of the drugs.
• Medical journals are supported by drug company advertising.
• Some incredibly powerful medical journals about the use of vitamins for treatments are blacklisted – meaning that they are not indexed by the US National Library Of Medicine. 
• Hundreds of papers show that high dosage of vitamins cures disease. They’re blacklisted!!!!
• 25% of ads on TV are for drugs in the U.S. Imagine the revenue
• Drugs are amazing for pain management, anesthesia, treating emergencies. They’re pathetic for treating diseases and chronic illnesses. 
• The public has come to rely on drugs for quick fix
• What would happen if everyone were to eat organic plant-based food? We’d have an epidemic of health
• What would happen if everyone were healthy? We’d suffer economically in a big way. No money in health
• Drug regulators require 2 consecutive tests to show the drugs are more effective than a placebo. It doesn’t matter how many tests took place that showed no positive results.
• Short-term drugs for life saving are fine (That’s an understatement – they’re amazing)
• Long-term meds are terrible
• Drugs never cure the root cause; they just treat only the symptoms.
• Anti-depressant drugs have been linked to suicide
• Studies done on all of the mass shootings in the US revealed all the murderers were all on some form of medication for depression
• 2 handfuls of cashew nuts gives you the same therapeutic dosage of what you find in Prozac!!
• If you’re malnourished, you should be depressed. So the first thing to do is to stop doing that. Get nourished; get juicing vegetables, starting eating real, wholesome, organic produce.
• 11,000 mg niacin (Vitamin B3) cured depressed person. Not 1 death from niacin per year, yet this is dismissed by the medical profession.
• There is no point in working with someone with psychiatric problems without their brain getting fuel from nutrition
• Every single drug is a liver toxin bar none 
• It is crucial to cleanse by cleansing through bowels.
• Must get toxins out of bowels to allow nutrients in. Toxins build up in the bowels (which is why enemas and colonic irrigations are so effective).
• To reverse Cancer you need to destroy the environment which breeds Cancer. (Make it alkaline and have tons of micronutrients).
• Gerson institute uses natural treatments for cancer
• Cancer is a $200bn a year industry. If the truth were out, that’s a big economic problem.
• To not get cancer, stack the deck in your favour and load your body with vitamins and minerals
  • Green tea has anti-cancerous properties
  • Colon cancer avoidable with high fibre diet
• Get tons of micronutrients
  • Japanese have lowest incidence of cancer in the world. Lots of omega-3 fish oils, great for heart disease and against Alzheimer’s
  • Japanese women, breast cancer very low. When they move to the US their risk of developing Cancer increases significantly
• 13% of women in US are at risk of developing cancer
• High dosage of vitamin C can kill cancer cells. They just get better. No adverse side effects.
• Mega dosage of vitamin C – intravenous.
• Controversial – Why would pharmaceutical companies like vitamins?
• We must make nutrition the primary prevention strategy.
• The healthcare system is a disease care system not interested in health
• The medical profession has it wrong.
• We must walk the walk; take vitamins, eat raw plant-based food, lots of fruits and vegetables, juice vegetables, be active
• Good health makes a lot of sense but doesn’t make a lot of dollars
• The best doctor in the world, the best nutritionist in the world, is you.

Pretty poignant stuff, right? A major takeaway I’ve had across all of the documentaries I’ve watched is that we are typically undernourished in the Western World. We are stuffing our faces, yet starving – starving ourselves of the key micronutrients we need, to fuel our cells. This is why I’ve started to drink vegetable juices daily. Check out this video I made on vegetable juicing a few weeks ago.  Click here.

Are you London-based or around? We are holding an event called “Heal Your Own Body” in London on 31st July 2018 at Planet Organic. We’d love to see you there! Get your TICKETS HERE. 

Here’s the Food Matters documentary trailer. It’s available on Netflix (or you can but it on Amazon).