The Magic Pill

A very well researched documentary on a topic that I myself have experienced.

Little reference to actual data, the real take away is to eat unprocessed whole foods. They didn't demonstrate that a ketogenic whole food diet is better than any other balanced whole food diet.

A bit biased towards animal products (I don't care either way but I smelled an agenda), again with no data to explain why animal sourced fats or proteins are better than other sources. Some dubious claims that our ancestors are mostly meat - hunter gatherers get most nutrition from veg and fruit because hunts are only occasionally successful.

Shame that a doco based around the fact that we have a lot of incorrect dietary information from government also tries to push a slight agenda which doesn't have supporting data.

I've been hearing a lot of people talk about this movie, and I hear a lot of people every day switching to keto diet for health benefits. Trying to improve your health and live a better lifestyle is not a bad thing - it's actually what every human being should strive to do. But you should make your choices and do a good research before doing so. Unfortunately, this hour-and-a-half movie doesn't do so. It's very underresearched and completely based on four individuals. They try to make you feel like you are discovering a thousand year old secret kept by this specific group of indigenous peoples from Australia, telling how "robust and muscular" they used to be, but if you actually look closer at the images they show in this documentary, you'll notice that those two words aren't the first ones that come to mind when you see those old black and white pictures. The keto diet has swept the first world countries by a storm in the last few years (especially the United States) and when I heard about it, and all the benefits of it, I tried it myself last summer. I bought a cookbook, I made an entire week of meal-preps, and I constructed a very detailed exercise plan. Ever since moving to the States, I started struggling with high blood pressure and the Keto diet was swearing to do so, and I was super excited to do it so I can get rid of my prescription pills. I started the diet and it was going very well: I lost almost 20 lbs in a little over a month and I started to look a lot better. I couldn't believe it, and I felt so great about myself, but then I had a knee injury and I was rushed to the hospital - where I discovered that my blood pressure was off the chart and the chest pain I was experiencing wasn't from hard workouts, but because I was on a brink of a heart attack. My cholesterol was off the hook, and my arteries were clogged up from all that fat I was ingesting. I immediately stopped the diet, and started warning people about the side effects of this "magic pill" that this documentary and all the Keto books fail to mention. And then just three months after I stopped my Keto diet, I heard that one of my customers, who actually told me about this diet, unfortunately passed away from a cardiovascular arrest which led to heart failure at age of 42. Keto diet is not what it's all hyped up to be, and this documentary does not provide any accurate information about nutrition or healthy diet. I say, do your own research and make up your own mind - don't let people who have personal gain (like the lovely chef who is behind this) serve you something as the truth, chew it up and put it in your mouth for you just to swallow.

5/28/18. I like watching documentaries about healthy living. I especially like those about nutrition. While this documentary includes quite a few gems about how important nutrition is to our health, the message of paying more attention to what we eat is muddied by the push for a ketogenic diet. Only a few cases are used to support the benefits of such a diet, which seems to help those with certain medical issues, and not necessarily meant for mainstream consumption. It's hard to expect the average person to watch this and try to figure out which facts are most useful and which may be extrapolations. Too bad.

This documentary helped my family make a huge change in our eating habits. I would love to see an update version to fortify even further the need to access our eating lifestyle