SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Console best movie i've ever seen.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Dennis Littrell The problem with the conclusion that this documentary comes to is it won't work! If all of humanity—seven billion strong and increasing—ate the "natural" quasi-Paleolithic diet that the scientists in this film find "perfect"...well they won't because with present technology it is impossible for the planet to feed that many people that high on the hog. Raising the necessary number of cows, pigs, chickens, etc. requires more land and fresh water than is available. It's as simple as that.The second problem involves a "what is, is right" kind of fuzzy thinking. The fact that our ancestors ate a lot more meat than they did grains does not mean that sort of diet is best. They ate that way because they had no choice.The third problem is that the kind of meat hunters and gatherers ate was a bit different from the fat-laden, choice cuts of meat eaten today. It was lean and grass-fed. And a lot of it wasn't meat at all. It was fish, shellfish, clams, mussels and insects.Aside from these three very important points the documentary is not bad. The film makes it clear that it is the modern diet of processed foods that is responsible for the obesity epidemic in the developed world. And yes the paleo-primal, hunter-gatherer diet is superior to the junk food that is shoved in our faces on TV, over the Internet, on billboards and at fast food restaurants.And yes meat- and fish-eating turned upright-walking dull-witted apes into hominids. Without high-quality foods we could not have grown our big brains. But that was then. This is now, and what is needed is a balanced diet of whole foods with plenty of fruits and vegetables, some carbs, some high protein foods, and oils from the trees: e.g., olives, avocados, coconuts, etc.—Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"

blashy This is not an exaggerated doc. It shows what we ate for millions of years and who it helped us thrive.The doc spends most of the time talking to scientists who actively study this, not people of opinion or ideological preferences (like a vegan). That's what I found most compelling.Some individuals will say how can this be a good diet when the lifespan was so short. Well science has also shown that life expectancy was not really affected by what our ancestors ate but how they did not know about hygiene which is the single most important element on how life expectancy is so high today, then you have medicine for injuries (and they lived in much harsher environments), as well you have death from childbirth which along with hygiene really kill a a life expectancy ratio.

Tyler Fenby The movie itself is excellent. It points out the problems in our modern diets, and gives a method of being healthy that has been nothing short of a miracle for me and my family.To address some issues others have had:It is true that life was hard during earlier times, meaning that only those that could survive in such harsh conditions could survive. This shaped us, but says nothing of our lifestyles today. If anything, this could help explain why intermittent fasting is so beneficial.Many insects/bugs are anything but unhealthy. You can think they're disgusting as an effect of the culture of your upbringing, sure, but to claim they're all unhealthy is just untrue.You can't conflate diet with hygiene. I don't counter vegetarians with "if all you want to do is eat plants in small meals, why don't you just take off all your clothes, ruminate, and forget about toilets?"If you don't think hunting, gathering, walking everywhere, crafting, and everything else that comes along with living as our ancestors did constitutes exercise, I can't imagine what would. Take a look at the physical fitness of modern H/G tribes and tell me they don't exercise.Humans are the most versatile species ever. We live and have lived everywhere from below sea level to the tops of mountains, from desert to jungle, eating every plant or animal that didn't kill us. To claim that a majority of humans throughout our evolution were primarily fishers is nonsense. At the very least, humans have been hunting for two _million_ years. More than enough to help shape us.Look at native populations all over the world. The Anbarra, Arnhem, Ache, Nukak, Hiwi, !Kung, and Hazda tribes. All eating the historical diets of their people, and all in good enough shape to live many long years in incredibly difficult environments."Many long years?", you say? "But I thought they only lived to 40!" You might want to read the paper "Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross- Cultural Examination." Hunter/Gatherers live to be 80. Want to know something even better? Many H/Gs get 70-80% of their calories from meat, and they have no atherosclerosis (per other papers by Kaplan, et al.).As for grains, while the heritage strains of wheat that we have been farming for the last 10k years might be fine, the fact is that the wheat we eat today is nothing even close. It should be considered an entirely new food type. Not to say that humans haven't found a new food and thrived on it before, of course, just that pointing out how long we've been eating it is irrelevant when it's been completely overhauled.In summary, the movie does an excellent job pointing out the problems of a modern diet, and offers an alternative that has proved to be hugely beneficial to those that try it. Humans function best when we eat what humans have eaten throughout our entire evolution: real food. Given our long evolutionary history of eating everything with a pulse, that should definitely include animals--meat, offal, marrow and all.

thornsthorns The entire documentary is all built on flawed logic, flawed assumptions and flawed conjectures. basic gist is, since evolution and history says that for 99.9% of human history we humans have been hunter gatherers, our diet should be like that. But that is a very flawed way of thinking. Just because our ancestors were meat eaters doesn't mean meat is better than vegetables for us. Our ancestors were not exactly optimizing their potential, just because they were living like animals. Evolution does not create perfect scenarios and perfect species of perfect health, that is a fallacy this documentary is based on. It assumes our ancestors were eating a diet, that they had perfectly evolved into. Which is not the case. While i agree with half the documentary (the half condemning modern diet of processed foods), the other half of it is a load of pile of false truths and false logics. I present here some of these flaws the documentary ignores. 1) Our ancestors no doubt starved many months, many weeks, many days of the year, through winter, when they could not find hunt food to the point where many no doubt died. This documentary completely ignores this fact when promoting this high meat diet theory. 2) Our ancestors also ate insects, larvae, and other unhealthy and disgusting things, at no point do they start promoting a diet of insects. Which again is another example of picking and choosing history. 3) Our ancestors also didn't bath or clean themselves at all. No one would say poor hygiene and living and eating like a wild dog is better for us, just because our ancestors did it for millions of years. So why use the same premise for dieting? 4) another example since our ancestors never exercised and only exerted themselves when hunting, optimal health means we should not exercise unless chasing a deer. Which they probably only did once a month for a few minutes and only in large groups. 5) historically human societies have been fishermen rather than hunters. This a fact the video ignores, as game food was not guaranteed whist fish from the ocean or rivers largely was. Thus most civilizations were situated on coastlines and near rivers. Ultimately the point is, our ancestors did not have an optimal best perfect diet, trying to mimic them is like trying to copy a C student in an exam, you are not going to better a better grade. This is the poor logic used in this DVD, which is flawed. If you look at native aborigine populations in south America, Australia who are following very much our ancestors diet, and look at the athletes from the Olympics, anyone with half a brain can tell that the athletes in the Olympics are healthier and better. Our ancestors also rarely lived beyond 40, average lifespan was probably around in the late 30's. so evolution hasn't engineered the paleo-primal diet to exactly keep our body ship shape beyond 40 (going by their own logic). So that's another flaw in using the logic of our ancestors diet is evolutionary wise the best for us. Frankly documentary is a load of baloney. But they are right in that the paleo-primal diet is a million times better than the modern processed sugar, salt, spices, oils artificial chemical diet we have in the 21st century. But they need to De-emphasise the meat intake, as our ancestors if anything like normal hunter gatherers would most likely have not had much meat in their diet as consistently as modern lifestyles or the paleo-primal diet likes to infer. As you can't exactly catch and cook a deer with a spear 3 times a day. Even lions eat only once a week in the wild, sometimes once a month periodically, and even starve when the herd migrates. As hunting eating food isn't exactly on the dot, breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner time like we have made nowadays. Saying completely no to wheat is a fallacy as no doubt our ancestors must have eaten wild grain, in order for them to become farmers of the stuff. So it was part of their diet, which documentary ignores.