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Forks Over Knives Analysis

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Lee Fulkerson’s Forks Over Knives prevents a radical approach to helping America get healthy and avoid health issues such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. These health issues have plagued America since the invention of fast food and have made America one least healthiest countries in the world. However, the film’s aversion to taking modern medicines and instead relying on a plant based diet to avoid new health issues and reverse existing health made me question the practicableness of having an entirely plant based diet as the film recommends. Additionally, critics of plant based diets such as Connie Diekman at Washington University feel that plant based diets will leave the deprived of nutrients that milk and dairy provide such as calcium. However, the two academic studies I found through my own research support that a plant based diet does lower your risk of heart attack and when done right, does not leave your body lacking critical nutrients. I found the points raised in Forks Over Knives to be extremely interesting because last year, I became a vegetarian for a semester and I noticed an increase in my energy and I felt better overall. The reason that I stopped being a …show more content…

For example, a study by Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD titled “Resolving the Coronary Artery Disease Epidemic Through Plant-Based Nutrition” found that eating a plant is one of the most effective ways to avoid coronary artery diseases. Esselstyn feels that by prescribing plant based diets doctors are focusing more on how to allow at risk patients to avoid getting coronary artery diseases as opposed to modern medicines, which focus more on treating these diseases once a patient already has it. Esselstyn says that being on the offense is always more effective than simply being on the defense (Esselstyn,

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