Chow Down DVD: Review By harveycritic

CHOW DOWN

Virgil Films

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B+

Directed By: Julia Grayer, Gage Johnston

Written By: Julia Grayer, Gage Johnston

Cast: Neil Barnard, T. Colin Campbell, David Katz, Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., Joel Fuhrman, Michael Jacobson, Luise Light, Michele Simon

Screened at: Critics' DVD, NYC, 7/17/10

If you've ever considered the paradox that the world's richest country, the one with the widest choice of food in the world, ranks only 47th in life expectancy, consider this: it is the very fact of America's wealth that causes its residents to tip the scales at unholy rates, leading to an epidemic of cases of heart attacks, cancer and diabetes. It's not that the bad food is "in the air," but that most of us choose to eat what tastes best, and what tastes best happen to be the meats, dairy and egg products that are high in fat and cholesterol. Let's not wonder, then, that a whopping two-thirds of us are overweight while half of the overweight are obese.

This information has been available and has been drummed into us long before Julia Grayer and Gage Johnston enlightened us with their 75-minute doc*mentary, "Chow Down," which may not have the bite, so to speak, of a Michael Moore production but is filled with cute and funny animation of the highest order to break up the minutes that cause doc*mentaries to be low on the popularity list: the talking heads.

To their credit, only a few talking heads are used by these researchers. We focus on one family of a man and woman and a teen, all of whom are fat, all promising to follow the dietary advice of their doctor-though only the woman of the house managed to see the program through, losing twenty pounds so far with a lot to go. Another family consists of a man who has had bypass surgery, and whose mortality is so fragile that his wife, who speaks to us while folding clothes from the dryer occasionally had tears in her eyes.

Among the wisdom given to us by the cardio surgeons-which includes the input to Dr. Neal Barnard of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine-we can dramatically lower our cholesterol by following a plant-based diet, eliminated the high fat products such as beef, pork, eggs and cheese. What Dr. Barnard never tells us (though it really shouldn't have made a difference) is that the PCRM is an organization of doctors who promote vegan diets, a program eliminating all animal-based foods, and one which is perhaps follows strictly by one percent of the American population.

And to please those few of us in the audience who mistrust the government, we learn that the USDA. The Department of Agriculture, is not necessarily on our side when it recommends a pyramid of foods to eat. The USDA has a conflict of interest: while it appears to be pro-consumer, it is responsible as well for pushing Americans to consumer the products of the American farm industry, and those included, of course, the unhealthy fats that Dr. Barnard and company are so much against.

In some black-and-white footage taken during the early 1950s, we learn that autopsies on Americans who were killed during the Korean War indicated that a whopping 77% of these folks whose age hovered around twenty-two had significant blockage in their hearts. And don't think that surgery is the answer. Bypass surgery and stents may keep one alive after an episode of blockage (usually caused not so much by big artery cloggers but by an attack of little devils that explode), but they are mere band-aids and, get this: they do not in any way increase life expectancy!

Consider the most vivid idea, one that puts a damper on those old excuses by people who way that "oh my entire family is fat and has been right down to the criminals who came over on the Mayflower": Genetics is the gun while food is the trigger. We can control what fate has given us by a healthy diet. Food counts: it's the source of great pleasure, though people who have been attacking their own hearts and forcing their bodies to yield to diabetes will find changing to a healthful alternative mighty difficult. Having this DVD in your library will help. Put it on when you're tempted to dig into flesh.

Unrated. 75 minutes. © 2010 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online