Tom M

Wow, did this show fall short. In short: There's good science and bad science. Can you tell the difference? I can! Watching the show, it wasn't long before it was obvious it was a lightly veiled infomercial for several businesses, the longevity industry - which make big bucks claiming they can help you live longer - and was platform for animal activists. Less than half of the show had to do with the twins study, the rest was anti beef, anti farmed fish, anti poultry, etc. While very pro veggies, there's no negatives of how agriculture is stressing the environment. Hint: It isn't only the cattle industry that is causing rainforests to be cut down. It's silent about how agriculture is putting enormous stress on water supplies, how fertilizer run off causes pollution, and enormous alge blooms. No mention on how much water would be needed to feed a vegetarian planet, nor how many more acres would be needed. How much natural land, including forests, would have to be cleared and plowed under to grow more veggies? Crickets.... I noticed the US was mentioned as seemingly solely responsible for much of this destruction, because of OUR love for meat, but no other country was mentioned by name for their part - especially with regards to overfishing. Speaking overfishing... The show did it's best to trash the fish farming industry, but not a peep that it is exists in part because overfishing has resulted in the depletion of natural stocks. Just like the push for veggies, they don't even mention what would happen if people only ate wild fish. I can ignore a certain amount of spin, as long as the information is good, and the science sound, but it was obvious the producers made the science fit the narrative. The science, as presented, was full of cherry picked results, lacked controls, and completely ignored major issues that might put negative light on their message. In the end, when they offered the results, there was a whole lot of infomation left out. This is an example of the message being more important than the science. Take the example of the reformed chicken farmer "turned mushroom farmer." Kinda odd how his new found business consisted of a single Seavan container, with a few shelves of mushrooms, in the middle of a huge, empty chicken growing building. Dollars to donuts, that was all staged by the producers of the show, ala reality TV. What's disturbing to me is; this takes advantage of the public's general lack of knowledge of how science works. We are living in a world where more and more people can't tell fact from fiction, and this is, in part, because more fiction is being presented as fact. It's more about ratings and clicks, than about being objective. I like to call what was presented as an example of "Cotton Candy Science." Looks like there's a lot of science there at first, but in the end it's mostly fluff, with very little actual substance. I imagine a tag line right after the title that says: "This show contains 10% REAL science!" As if that's a good thing. To those who don't know how good studies work, it's easy to spin a lousy study, and make it seem like it was well done. This one was absolutely full of holes as presented. My guess is the true results of the study didn't fit the conclusion they wanted, so they threw out most of the data, and presented only what little remained that backed their message. Yep, bad biased science.