Eating You Alive

This is a great documentary and I have nothing but respect for the content including the testimonials and the information presented.

However, I'm very sad that this movie as it currently stands is edited in a way that makes it very difficult to watch and to understand at a very basic level.

"Why," you ask? Because there are two different completely unrelated yet concurrent streams of audio taking place almost constantly throughout the entire movie!

The first is of course the vocals, i.e., the main interviews, testimonials, etc. (Sadly, there is no narration which is a separate issue from what I'm writing about here -- narration in this as most documentaries of the time is left to a third track, if you will, which is silent written word overlaid and often missed by the audience...)

The first audio track is almost non-stop. In other words, the monologues are immediately juxtaposed with practically no breaks. But this is not what makes it so hard to understand.

The second audio track is the problem: constantly, with only a few breaks, is an entirely unrelated and unregulated barrage of musical notes that seem to be intended to make the monologue/testimonials more impactful.

But the music serves exactly the opposite function. Partly because it's so dissonant vis-a-vis the vocals, but mostly because it is so LOUD, it drowns the audio and confuses the listener so much that the brain of this viewer was left exhausted and frustrated at the extra cognitive effort required to really parse out and understand what was being said.

I don't understand why this is so hard for filmmakers to understand: as viewers age, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to understand speech that is noisy (captured and/or processed poorly) and accompanied by music (in this case, just another source of noise over top of the spoken audio track).

The result is an overabundance of audio interference patterns, if you will, that scale directly with the volume level. So, whereas the listener would normally be better able to understand the spoken audio track by turning the volume up, when accompanied by music, the track just gets that much harder to understand when the volume is increased.

Please -- out of respect for your viewers and for the good of the world so people can understand this important information -- and for all that is good in the world -- please remix the audio on this and re-release it with all that horrid noise removed or greatly (substantially) reduced in volume!

Please!

Thank you.

Highly informative and well paced. A great introduction to plant based living and the benefits of this type of dietary lifestyle. Recommended!

Rather than a documentary, I would rather call this title a vegan or "whole-food, plant-based diet" propaganda film. It does not make an effort to present a balanced story, cite reliable sources (like professors at a medical school) or give you a comprehensive overview of the food it mentions. I cannot see any intention of this movie actually educating people about nutrition or health. Rather, it promotes vegetables throughout the movie and cherry-picks negative information about meat, which is not how things actually are, with the hope to scare you into giving up eating meat all together.

It shares many of the fundamental fallacies of "What the Health", so I do not really want to get deep into them. The narrative is same: conspiracy theories, scaremongering, extreme cases (e.g. 500 pound guy), "common people" telling their life story in the most dramatic way, physicians explaining science who are actually authors and speakers for advocating veganism and benefit from such activities. You hardly find a professor in a medical school or nutrition science department of a university, who gives you a more comprehensive overview of academic opinions of nutrition, in these propaganda films. The real conspiracy is that these people (physicians, speakers, authors and chefs etc) try to link everything to diet without talking about other equally important factors, totally ignore the benefits of meat and dramatize the potential danger of meat, so that you can be scared and then tricked into buying their vegan diets or even their treatment programs.

As for this film specifically, the plot is just a mess. Massive amount of "statistics", interviews and video clips just pour towards you without a clear outline or any structure, which is even worse than an endless lecture. There are way too many "real life cases" where protagonists having several health issues talk about their experience, which are just repetitive and boring. There are also so many short physician interviews about a lot of things that you lose track of what this film is really about. It is more similar to grandmother's nagging, so you can imagine what a terrible experience it is to watch this movie. Several of the physicians from "What the Health" have showed up, so you more or less know what this film is like before even watching it. This movie relates everything, from lupus to erection dysfunction, to your diet. I am really terrified by this! lol. Plus, if you just use a bit of your brain, you will know that the "Cleveland Clinic" stuff is just blatant advertisement, period.

IMDb declined my first submission of the review, citing "violating guidelines", but I do not really think it fit into that category, so I hope IMDb staff did not do that out of personal bias. The producers should really think clearly if this is the way to tell the world their ideals, and if they should be doing it at all.

This movie advocates a whole foods plant-based diet, somewhat low in fat - not too many nuts and seeds.

This is certainly healthy, as long as you are careful to get enough of the nutrients that may be missing in a plant-based diet, such as B12, calcium, iodine ... It helps prevent and reverse the metabolic-syndrome type problems that end up killing so many people: obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis. So many people who are fat and sick, in the USA and around the world. It is such a huge tragedy, and it is SO unnecessary.

BUT, this movie tries to sell this diet as a cure for things for which it is not a cure. My autoimmune problems and severe allergies didn't get better after I started eating this way, in 2005 or so. So there's an anti-testimonial, if you like.

There's a very good case to be made for eating this way. For one's health; for the environment; and to prevent animal suffering. Those reasons SEEM like they should be good enough, without making exaggerated claims.

I think a good portion of the western world need to see this film. We need to change the ways we eat for the world, our health, our futures and the animals! As a health professional myself, I strongly agree with the content of this film