We have talked about this movie before and it was a fun time. The reasoning is so terrible that I would only expect it to convince 1. People who have never really thought about the issue. 2. People who want to be convinced. Basically the contention is that adding sugar, trans fats, vegetable oils, refined flour, meat, and preservatives and artificial chemicals to a person's diet makes them sick. And if you eliminate all of these you will feel better. But wait, if they are consistently clustered like that how do we know that all of those are a problem? What if some of those are actually very healthy but just not healthy enough to mitigate the effects of the other ones? By this reasoning we can't even implicate mountain dew and potato chips because it could all be the meat. Or we can't implicate the meat because it could be the trans fats. In fact we can't implicate anything in the cluster at all based upon the observation that the addition of many of them makes people sick and the retraction of all of them improves health.

And why oh why do they talk about the Japanese and their low meat diet as if the fact that the Japanese don't tend to eat a whole lot of meat as a whole is the reason for their good health? It is the case that the healthiest Japanese people who live the longest eat the most animal products according to these researchers in Japan. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=1407826&query_hl=7&itool=pubmed_docsum

I'm sure you'll poke the heck out of the rest, which is hilarious. It just seems a bit inane to watch a propaganda movie and then make a big blustering article stating

"What every human being should do is eat a vegetarian diet based on whole foods. Period. That's it. Animal protein is bad for you. Dairy is bad for you. Forget the ads: Milk and eggs are bad for you. Skim milk is no better, because it contains proportionately more animal protein. What you're trying to avoid is dietary cholesterol. You also need to cut way down on salt and sugar, and run like hell from high fructose corn syrup."

Simply because the movie told him so and he happened to be uncritical and lacking knowledge of the nature of causality or all of the evidence that contradicts their purported evidence.

I'm disappointed but not surprised. We all - but especially someone of Ebert's generation - have been steeped in the Gospel of the diet/heart hypothesis, the lipid hypothesis and all the rest of the bologna. I'm sure that when the Mayo Clinic recommended he switch from butter to trans-fat-laden margarin, he did. I'll bet his house had more than one big blue tub of Crisco. I'll bet that at some point in his life he owned a bread maker and that he loves pasta and orange juice.

I'm a movie buff and I like Ebert. I've always found his reviews intellectually honest and generally well-informed. I'm disappointed he didn't talk with anyone whose views contradict the movie's, but I'm willing to cut him a break. I think we underestimate how tough it is for people who for 50 years have listened to the low-fat, vegetarian Gospel to change their views.

Denise Minger gave the definitive review of this movie, exposing for the propaganda it is.

I'll take as progress just about any statement against the paradigm of the SAD...

I have now, and I confess I smiled as I read the whole thing. He is reviewing a movie, not testing and validating the truth of the information contained within that movie. Anyone who goes on a raw vegan diet as a result of Roger's review deserves exactly what they get. He confesses that he was fat, sassy and not going to give an inch until he had to do it or would die. I think that qualifies as bias, don't you? And the news that the China Study et al is deeply flawed is just beginning to get out there to the informed, let alone the converted vegans. Meanwhile, they are beginning to get seriously sick. Anyone on SAD who does raw vegan will have an interesting experience... but even Roger slid into burger land now and then. I know I did plenty of times.