Review of (Un)Well, You Are What You Eat, and Poisoned

This article is about my experiences watching the Netflix shows (Un)Well, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, as well as the documentary film Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food. These are of particular interest to me as they are directly related to my day job, which includes writing food and dietary supplement safety plans for food industry businesses.  The plans I write must be science based, and so I do a lot of science work involving food and supplements. And even though I love my job very much, it’s all quite boring and nuanced, and is nothing like what is discussed in these Netflix documentaries.

Beyond my day job, I was a vegetarian for about four years after college, but I went back to eating meat in my twenties largely because it made more sense to eat what my wife eats, and my health didn’t seem to be affected much either way when I didn’t eat meat or when I started eating meat again. I also exercise every day (tai chi) and practice mind/body spirituality to go along with that (Neidan Alchemy). That’s some weird stuff by American standards, and as such, I’m all for attempts any person makes to be healthy.  I’m certainly not one to judge, as I do not believe there is one correct approach to being healthy. 

Netflix Documentaries as Entertainment vs. Science

Before we get into the specific science problems with these Netflix documentaries, I want to say that (Un)Well, Poisoned, and You Are What You Eat are very good documentaries and very well made. I’m personally glad I watched them and was properly entertained by each of them. I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to recommend that people watch them as they’re a good time, and each has an entertaining story involving interesting topics. But, it is troubling to me as someone who specializes in both food safety and science that these shows purposely give the viewer an impression of learning something, when they are fairly inaccurate in these topics and sometimes totally inaccurate. And although I have felt this way for a few years, it is You Are What You Eat that finally prompted this writing. 

How Science and Math is Presented in Film

Generally speaking, science and math presented in fiction or documentaries have always been close to gibberish, going back to the invention of film over 100 years ago, and that is fine. Many, if not most, adults learned whatever math and science they know in elementary school, junior high school and high school, and forgot it as soon as possible. These topics are difficult, tedious and confusing, and most importantly, not actively required in our day to day lives. 

But science, especially around food and nutrition, offers the hope of being better, both in how we feel and how we navigate the complexity of life. And technology is all around us, and it offers the promise and possibility of improvement (or is at least sold that way), and science is very closely linked to that technology, which makes us all feel so close to science, even if we don’t know or remember much about it. 

And this takes us to Netflix, the most popular streaming service currently on the market. A company and platform that produces huge amounts of content, and carefully tracks what is popular to make more of those types of content to keep people coming back for more. Those algorithms have clearly determined that at least some of its audience want to watch shows about food, science and nutrition, and so they make them, and that’s great.

Misinterpreting Netflix Documentaries as Science

Since (Un)Well, Poisoned, You Are What You Eat by and large do not have any useful science in them, they are not scientifically correct and you are not learning any science when you watch these shows. If you know that while you’re watching, great, but if you think you’re watching science, you are not, and that is potentially bad. 

The problem starts with the people in the shows that pop up to explain science in an authoritative way. These talking heads may really be scientists, but the things they are saying in the shows don’t need to be said by a scientist because they are so basic and vague that any actor or participant could say the same information, and it would be fine. The shows and movies only indicate that the person is a “scientist” to get you to associate the thing said as something to do with science. It’s the same basic effect as commercials presenting an actor wearing a long white lab coat to make you associate them with being a doctor. It’s a trick, and it works like a charm!

And all of (Un)Well, Poisoned, You Are What You Eat embrace presenting themselves as science, and even though You Are What You Eat has a disclaimer at the beginning about how it is only entertainment, there is just no reasonable way that casual viewers are not thinking they are watching a scientifically valid presentation. None of these three are, and no one watching should think of it as science, no matter how many people from Stanford University are in them. 

Bias in Documentaries

With respect to (Un)Well, Poisoned, You Are What You Eat, when science is mentioned as part of them, it definitely gives the potentially false sense to viewers that the science talk is anywhere near correct or useful, as none of it is all that close, and there’s a good reason for that. Real science isn’t particularly entertaining, no matter how it’s dressed up. It can be done, for sure, but Netflix’s content generation machine, at least in the cases here, isn’t really trying to make real science entertaining.  

The first reason for this is that science, and more specifically, the scientific method, is biased. It must be biased by its very nature. The bias of science is tied to the starting idea, the hypothesis, being investigated by the person or team doing the experiment. A hypothesis comes from the perspective of those performing the experiment and what they think, or wonder, or are confused by is the starting point, as is the way the investigation is set up.

Lack of Persuasive Scientific Argument

For a show like You Are What You Eat, the people setting up that “experiment” cared about it being entertaining, because it’s meant as entertainment. For (Un)Well, each episode has the same exact format, which is to present half of the show as a for the topic, and to present half of the show against that topic. Right down the middle, so that everyone watching can feel that their position is properly represented, whether they believe it is good or bad. In each episode, a “scientist” is presented to explain some medical or scientific thing that might explain the for or against argument, and casually it feels like there’s some kind of link to science. But, as a person who does science for a living, none of those episodes had anything close to a persuasive scientific argument. 

Every time a person on You Are What You Eat was presented as being associated with a prominent university, or on (Un)Well as a doctor or researcher, that was meant to be shorthand to the viewer as “Scientist” or “Smart”, but you as the viewer cannot know if those people are really scientists (or good scientists), or if they are smart. What we can say for certain is that the producers, editors, directors, and participants in those shows were there to entertain you, not to do good science, and they presented predetermined and biased ideas because it was decided by the folks making those shows, and possibly at Netflix, that it would make for good entertainment (which it did). Any information on those shows should be discounted as part of the show, not as actually factual information. 

Science is Ruined on the Cutting-Room Floor

The second reason for this is that science, and more specifically, the scientific method, is boring. It must be boring by its very nature. After the hypothesis is set by the person or team doing the science a rigorous, repeatable investigation must be performed. With a show like You Are What You Eat we don’t know how much of it had to be reshot, rewritten, reconsidered and modified to make for its main purpose, which again, is entertainment. The viewer can easily feel the presented “steps” of the experiment as each episode is unfolding. At each step in the show, a “scientist” or “expert” explains to the viewer an idea or machine that will provide the researchers with valuable information. This is expertly edited to keep the story moving, and anything that may have bored you, the viewer, was taken out and landed on the cutting room floor. The stuff that was removed was just as much science as what was left in, and by taking it out, they ruined the science, even though it is fun to watch. Each step in each episode where one of the twins “learns” the results of anything is staged, and set up to be fun to watch, not right or wrong. There just cannot be science in this, any more than there can be real legal work or medicine practiced in a documentary. If it was being done correctly, you wouldn’t be interested in it. For it to be interesting to watch, it has to be manipulated. 

The last reason for this is that science, and more specifically, the scientific method, is frustrating by its very nature. That frustration is born of the complexity of life, and trying to understand it through experimentation, scientific or otherwise, forces us to see contradictory or incomplete ideas, and we have to settle on understanding parts of the truth, while never quite getting all of the truth, because that’s impossible. 

How the USDA and FDA are Presented in Poisoned

In the documentary Poisoned, this frustration is particularly evident in the fact that the creators of that show pulled a major bait-and-switch as part of their story. This distortion of the truth is obvious to food safety professionals, but is purposefully done to trick casual viewers and to make the documentary more impactful and troubling. That bait-and-switch is that there are two parts of government responsible for food safety, and they don’t work together. The folks making the documentary know this very well, but they had to blur it, otherwise there wouldn’t be enough to talk about to make it a full length documentary. As a result, the film is inaccurate in the point that it makes, like way off. 

The truth is that the USDA oversees meat and poultry, and when the documentary is talking about the failures of meat, as they are in the beginning of the movie, they are talking about the USDA and its enforcement agency, the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS). But there wasn’t enough of an entertaining movie, or a long enough movie to be just about the USDA and the FSIS.  My personal opinion is that the USDA has done a good enough job that it isn’t possible to make a full documentary about the failures of the USDA. To deal with this frustrating fact, Poisoned switches throughout the movie from talking about the USDA/FSIS to talking about non-meat and non-poultry examples that have nothing to do with the USDA, and instead have to do with the FDA, which is completely different and operates completely differently. 

The movie doesn’t and can’t explain to the viewer the frustrating realities of two separate regulatory organizations each doing a good (or good enough) job controlling the safety of the food supply so it switches back and forth between hamburger, peanut butter, cantaloupes and milk and back to meat and poultry as if it’s talking about one big thing, instead of talking about two different big things that don’t really have anything directly to do with each other. The film never even comes close to noting that distinction. When they are done presenting the deficiencies of the FDA, they then switch back to making the case that the head of the USDA was corrupted by associations with lobbying groups, and they have an anonymous FSIS inspector making statements about problems with inspections in meat and poultry facilities. By the end, no viewer could possibly understand the actual issues with food regulation, or the underlying science behind them since the creators have to blur the details to make that point. In the end, it is not convincing, and certainly not science or fact, even if the issues they raise about home food safety may be valid. 

Science Documentaries are Fun, Not Fact

I love films, and I love documentaries. While (Un)Well, Poisoned, and You Are What You Eat are all good documentaries, please don’t take them as fact, and don’t use them as the foundation of your understanding of food, food safety, nutrition or science, they are just for fun. 

Working in an industry that affects us all very close to home, and yet is misunderstood and poorly portrayed in film, I encourage you to take the time to be involved, be informed, and be interested. As we celebrate World Food Safety Day, I hope you find some value in these documentaries and other food films to spread the word. Entertainment has its value to be sure, but let this be a jumping off point to pique your interest, tickle your tastebuds, but most of all, take it with a grain of salt.