Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary
Uploaded: 2019-11-21T20:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-21. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary

Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Kresser! Joe, good to be back. How are you, buddy?
Good to see you.
Yeah, we are here because of the film The Game Changers. I watched it. I
watched it today. I
watched the whole thing from start to finish. And I have to say before we even
start, I like the guy
who's in it very much. James Wilkes, a very nice guy. He's an excellent fighter.
He won the ultimate
fighter. And I don't think he's a bad person. I've only had a little bit of
interaction with him just
over the past couple of days via email. He seems like a really great guy. Yeah,
a very good guy.
Genuine. We're just going to get into it. So what was your thoughts on the film
and what stood out
immediately? Okay. So a little bit of context. You know, I think this film was
the best of all
the vegan documentaries that have been made. I'll just say that up front. I
think it's pretty well
done as a film. Yes. You know, it's got a big budget, pretty good storyline.
James Cameron,
Jackie Chan. Lots of celebrities, Arnold. You know, it's good graphics. Like it's
just a well-made film.
And I think it's, especially for someone who doesn't have the background to,
you know, or
science awareness to critique some of the claims, it's going to be really persuasive
and compelling.
And I've definitely, you know, whenever a film like this comes out, my email
inbox just blows
up. Like, have you seen this film? What? Oh my God. You know, like I'm eating
meat. I'm going to kill
myself. And it's just like, uh, same as cigarettes. Right. And you know, I was
talking to Jamie about
it before we started recording. Like I could set my watch to it every year.
There's something like
this happens and I've got to do a response. I consider it part of my, it's part
of my public.
Do you think that they're making these films because they believe what they're
saying?
Or do you think they're making these films because they are trying to convert
people
to being vegan? And they think that distorting reality and just bending things
and cherry picking
data is acceptable because the long run, the benefits of getting the world to
shift over
to a vegan diet. It's worth not being completely objective or honest about the
actual facts.
No, I think they believe it. I think people like, I mean, James, for example, I
think he's genuinely
trying to help people. I think he's looked at the data and he just came to a
different conclusion
than somebody like me has. And, you know, I mean, this is, there's something
called confirmation
bias. I'm sure many of your guests have talked about, but it's a basic human
tendency where we,
we tend to only look at the data that support our point of view and discount
the rest of it.
And it's, you know, even really, really good scientists have a hard time
overcoming that.
Everybody is guilty of it to some degree, including me. Um, but I think, uh,
yeah. So I think generally
the people who are making these films really believe in it. They, they believe
in, uh, the,
the power of a vegan diet, you know, from a nutrition perspective. And they
also believe
that it's going to help save the world. The beginning of it, I thought was so
strange when
James talked about being injured and doing all the research he did, which seems
like an extraordinary
amount of, what do you say? Like a thousand hours of research. And that the
thing that stood out was
that the Roman gladiators, at least in this one particular location, um,
according to the analysis
of their bones, uh, it appears that they had a vegetarian diet. Yeah. That they
ate a lot of grain.
That was strange too. I mean, first of all, gladiators were basically prisoners
of war criminals. So
the diet they're being fed is not prison food. Yeah. It's prison food. They're
slaves that are
forced to fight to the death. They had a life expectancy of about two years
once they became
a gladiator. And, um, it's interesting. They featured Fabian cons who is the
scientist you
remember who they talked to and definitely seemed to kind of buy into the plant-based
diet idea or the
idea that they were, um, vegetarian, you know, by design or, or by choice. And
they didn't talk to his
collaborator, Carl, Carl Grossman, who's been quoted in the media saying, here's
a quote. Uh, and by the
way, all of the references, full bibliography, show notes, everything are at kresser.co
slash game
changers. Cause I want this to be totally evidence-based. People can check what
I'm saying right there.
So he said the vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights.
Gladiators,
it seems were fat consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley and
legumes,
like beans was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also
packed on the pounds.
Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat, a fat cushion protects you from cut wounds
and shields
nerves and blood vessels in a fight. So they were basically fattening them up
so they could survive
longer in, in the arena. It's not an ideal diet for, you know, fighting and
muscle protein synthesis and
nutrition. It was basically to fatten them up so they could survive longer.
Yeah. This seems so obvious
that I couldn't believe it was actually in the film. And it seemed, it just
seemed blatantly deceptive
because everyone knows what their life was. It's not like these were these
elite athletes that were
competing in the Olympic games. These were people that they were sending out to
die for other people's
enjoyment. Right. And the name, uh, my Latin's terrible, but I think it was hordiari
or something.
It means like barley eater. Yes. It was an epithet. It was an insult. It wasn't,
you know, a compliment.
It was like, ha ha, you can, you only can, can afford to eat barley. Right. So
yeah, it was a bizarre
way to start the film. I thought there could have been better ways to do it.
And let me also just say,
like if this film, if the purpose of this film was to say it's possible to
thrive on a plant-based diet
and look, here's some athletes that have done that, I wouldn't have had any
qualms with it.
Clearly there are examples of people who thrive on a plant-based diet. Yes. If
you follow the diet
correctly, it can be done. Rich Roll, we talked about last time. Scott Jurek,
who's one of the athletes
in the film, seemed to do well. Dottie Bausch, who's one of the athletes in the
film. If you really plan
it well and you understand what you're doing and you're on it, it's totally
possible. No dispute with
that. But where I take issue with it is it went a step further and said, this
is the optimal diet
for athletes and everybody else, which, you know, even though it was a film ostensibly
about athletes,
it definitely crossed the line into this is the approach that everybody should
do.
Yeah. I mean, they made these claims, like all of a sudden people got stronger
and faster and more
endurance. Like there's no evidence to support that. There's no evidence other
than their anecdotal
statements of what they did. There's no one has ever put anyone on a vegan diet
and then run them
through extreme endurance tests and found the significant increase in VO2 max
or muscle strength
or any of those things. None of this has ever been done. So if it's true anecdotally
for these people,
it would have been really interesting if there was some actual data to go with
that, where they showed
studies. Right. I mean, we have James talking about his ability to do the
battle ropes that all of a
sudden he could do an hour and before he could only do 10 minutes. Well, I find
that really hard to
believe that you gained 50 minutes of your battle rope time just from ropes.
And if that was the only
thing in the film that I found hard to believe, you know, I'd have to let it go.
I mean, the guy's an
athlete. He's an amazing athlete. He was a great fighter. He's got fantastic
endurance. He has excellent
martial arts technique. I would just buy it at face level or face value. But
there's a lot of those.
There's a lot. And I mean, we can go through it and talk about, I mean, there's
that problem,
which is there's no peer reviewed evidence to back that up. But even the anecdotal
evidence is a little
shaky is when we start to talk about some of the athletes in the film, and then
also examples of
athletes outside of the film who, you know, switched to a vegan diet. And we
look and see what happened to
them after they did that. The problem here is something that I call the vegan
honeymoon,
which is, you know, you take someone who's been on a standard American diet,
they're eating KFC,
McDonald's, etc. And they switch from that to a plant based diet. Well, of
course, they're going to
feel better. They've gone from eating absolute crap to real foods. And so for a
period of time,
they're going to feel better for sure. But then what happens over a longer
period of time, you know,
some not getting enough protein, just in terms of quantity and not getting the
right quality of
protein that starts to have an impact. Micronutrient deficiencies, you know,
vitamin A, zinc, calcium,
iron, things like that take a while to develop. So you're not going to see that
decline in performance
happen right away. It might take three months, it might take six months, it
might take nine months,
it depends on all kinds of factors, genetics, health status going into it, the
type of exercise and
activity that they're doing, the way they're implementing the diet, etc. So you
have to not
just look at what happens a month after someone goes vegan, you have to look at
what happens six
months, a year after or two years after and we can look at specific examples of
that. So in the absence
of the correct amount of amino acids, the correct amount of specific nutrients,
you start to see a
slow decline, right? So and this is something that they're not taking into
account. Yeah,
one of the things they talked about was protein content. And I immediately knew
that this was not
correct, or that they're being deceptive, they were talking about three ounces
of steak,
versus what do they compare peanut butter sandwich, and maybe some lentils? Is
that what it was? Oh,
boy. Well, the problem is the amino acid profile of that steak is far superior,
the amount of protein
that your body absorbs is far superior. You're talking about a completely
different thing.
This is known science, but you can get as many amino acids from plant based
proteins,
but you need to eat a higher quantity. Yeah, right. And that's, that's what's
important. It's not the
overall grams of protein, it's the quality of the protein, what's the amino
acid of the profile of
the protein, and how does your body absorbent? Again, this does not mean like I'm
a giant fan of
hemp protein. I eat that stuff all the time. It's great. It's just you can't
say that protein
grams are equal to protein grams because they're, they're not. No, but it's
even worse than that.
Jamie, pull up slide four, if you can. There's, I made some graphics here
because it's sometimes
easier to understand when you're looking at a picture. So for the, the peanut
butter sandwich
thing, it was like, there's a, there's the same amount of protein in a peanut
butter sandwich as
there is in three ounces of beef. So I looked up the data, of course. So three
ounces of 90% lean ground
beef has 24 grams of protein. You get two slices of wheat bread. We'll give
them the benefit of the
doubt that it's whole wheat and not white bread. That's five grams. One
tablespoon of peanut butter
is four grams. So you'd have to have five tablespoons of peanut butter in that
sandwich to equal three
ounces of beef. That's a third of a cup of peanut butter. That's a lot of
fucking peanut butter.
You ever made a peanut butter sandwich with a third cup of peanut butter? I
probably have, but I'm a
glutton. I'm a legit glutton. I've probably done that many times. And that's
600 calories versus 200
calories from the ground beef. For the, just for the same amount of protein.
Just quantity. We're not
even getting into qual