Eating You Alive is a 2018 vegan health documentary film about why Americans are suffering from chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, among other diseases, and whether the outcome can be changed.
Paul David Kennamer Jr.'s film Eating You Alive addresses why and what Americans consume is the source of chronic diseases that harm the population, and can as well be the solution to save lives one meal at a time by improving people’s diet. In Eating You Alive, leading nutritionists and medical professionals provide a practical look at why Americans are so unhealthy, what is accountable for this, and how using whole-food, plant-based foods can improve an individual’s health. Kennamer and producer Merrilee Jacobs stated they were inspired by their personal experiences with whole-food, plant-based diets. The Executive Producer was Dan Purjes, and the film is owned by the non-profit Purjes Foundation.
The documentary features Samuel L. Jackson, James Cameron, Neal D. Barnard, Joel Fuhrman, Michael Greger, and Dean Ornish, among others.
Production
Directed and written by Paul David Kennamer Jr., Eating You Alive was officially released April 5, 2018 in the United States. The film was screened in 569 theaters. To film Eating You Alive, the production team flew around the nation to interview scientific researchers and physicians, as well as movie stars, gourmet cooks, and ordinary people.
Film summary
The documentary discusses the benefits of a proper diet to reduce millions of Americans' deaths each year due to chronic diseases. Each year millions of deaths worldwide are due to chronic diseases, Cardiovascular disease being the leading cause of death at 17.3 million per year.
The film focuses on the continuous rise of chronic diseases in Americans as a result of diet habits. It criticizes Americans' diet, and proposes how a change in nutrition can reverse the effects of chronic diseases. The film advised tips and innovative ways of consuming products that can improve well-being, where people that have switched from the traditional American diet to a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle have shown major improvement. Further, it addressed flaws in the health care system concerning American's health and their diet as well as pollution consequences tied to diet because the animals being consumed emit large amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
The film states that chronic diseases are the leading cause of death and disability in the US, where chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes affect three-quarters of the adult population and the direct causes can be traced to the food eaten in their daily diets. The documentary talks about the correlation of the American diet and its contribution, as physicians referred to in the film, to the most obese population in the history of the human race where 68.8% of American adults are overweight or obese. Physicians and nutritionists in the documentary address how food in the American diet has certain chemical components that have “enslaved” people into the vast consumption of these foods. These experts claim that the food consumed in the diets of Americans can lead to developing chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and believed that if foods cause diseases, they can also cure them.