‘Forks Over Knives’ Is About Bucking a System

“You might not expect someone like me to explore the connection between diet and disease,” says Lee Fulkerson. He pulls his car to the curb and opens the door to reveal why you might not expect it: he’s got cans of Red Bull and Coke, which he admits he’s just finished. ‘I haven’t always had the healthiest lifestyle,” he reports. “And I’ve eaten more than my share of fast food.”

And for his sins, Fulkerson is now visiting “Transition to Health.” Here he meets Matt Lederman and Alona Pulde, Los Angeles doctors who advocate healthy eating as a means to improved health (and misspell “cholesterol” on their website). It sounds simple, as well as familiar. Indeed, Forks Over Knives soon looks like an inverse reflection of Super Size Me, such that Fulkerson films himself as he acts out what you already know. It begins with a montage of news reports reminding you that the United States is in the midst of a “massive health crisis,” with some 40% of the population overweight and diet-related health costs of $120 billion annually.”

The reason, the film asserts from jump, is money. As Bill Maher asserts in a clip from Real Time, “There’s no money in healthy people, and there’s no money in dead people. The money is in the middle, people who are alive, sort of, but with one or more chronic conditions.” It’s a worthy subject of investigation, certainly, the collusion of government and the health care industry to medicalize wellbeing in order to extract endless profits from increasingly longer-lived and sickly consumers.

Forks Over Knives goes on to make a fairly specific, if sometimes rambling, argument for eating plants. Fulkerson follows a plant-based diet, as do several other subjects he introduces and revisits (including his fireman son, Rip). Their health improves drastically — they lose weight, they stop taking prescription medications, and they tell you how much better they feel, more than once. These repetitive personal testimonies provide the usual ground for the film’s broader assertion, that plant-based diets improve health and prevent increasingly common diseases, including cancer and diabetes.

These interviews are intercut with explanations by doctors, primarily Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn, whose initially different research projects come together. Both grew up on farms with cows, the film points out, during an era when doctors — and the beef and dairy industries — promoted the importance of protein in human diets. “It was a life force,” says Campbell, who was driving a tractor on his dad’s farm by age eight, “the stuff of civilization itself.” And in the late 1950s, the film points out over archival images of drive-ins and supermarkets, “Most scientists believed we needed a lot more of it” — or something resembling it. While “scientists” are left here to float as a generic “other,” Esselstyn and Campbell are presented as earnest believers in their own separate studies on a range of topics, including cholesterol, cancer, and blood vessels.

As their stories and their research come together in the film’s narrative structure, they’re mostly supported by other doctors, and opposed by one hapless straw woman, Connie Diekman, Director of University Nutrition at Washington University. Fulkerson walks into her office and lets her talk: “When you eliminate animal foods from your eating plan,” she submits, “you run the risk of inadequate protein content. Animal proteins provide all the amino acids that we need for cell growth, tissue repair, and overall health.” Like the easy targets in some of Michael Moore’s films, Diekman serves only to set up a rebuttal, in this case, from Campbell: “Eating whole [plant-based] foods, it’s virtually impossible to be protein deficient without being calorie deficient,” he explains, with numbers that counter her circa-1955 talking points.

As Campbell goes on to describe the “symphony of mechanisms” that comprise human bodies, other interviewees support his case. Rip and his fellow firemen challenge the idea that masculinity is a function of meat-eating. Psychotherapist Doug Lisle maintains that processed foods — dense with sugars and fat and salt — are not only bad for you but also addictive, producing what he calls a “pleasure trap.” As he speaks, you see an animated shark, gobbling French fries and ice cream, turns increasingly lumpy and fat, until it’s caught in a net.

This sort of lecturing — not exactly patronizing, but not inspiring either — is all too common in recent documentaries, the cute visual aids (cartoons and graphs) illustrating both scares and seeming solutions. But even as Forks Over Knives seems unoriginal and preachy, it also comes up with the occasional insight, however unexplored. Chicago’s commissioner of health, Terry Mason, appears at first in an upscale restaurant, demonstrating the meatless diet he proposed the city’s population take up for a month in 2009. He goes on to point out the connection between class and diet in the United States: “Unfortunately, poor people are poor in everything. They’re poor in health, they’re poor in food choices, they’re poor in almost every aspect you could think of.”

As Fulkerson repeats the point, equally vaguely (“This makes the less prosperous particularly vulnerable to the low grade addiction of highly processed foods”), the film cuts to its embodied example, San’Dera Nation, a mother of five living in Cleveland, diagnosed in 2008 with diabetes and hypertension. She describes the encouragement and education she received from Esselstyn and his wife (who quite dramatically one afternoon called her at the very moment she was about to eat a chili dog). She smiles as she tells the story of her own doctor’s reaction to her improved health. “What’s that doctor trying to do, take you off your medications?” “Yeah,” she nods, “That’s the goal.”

Forks Over Knives doesn’t break down how various industries do their damage. Rather, it uses stories like San’Dera Nation’s to make arguments that are at once unsubtle and imprecise… and still, persuasive.