Making of the Film, “Eating”

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Mike Anderson share the journey that has led him to make the amazing film “Eating.”

Renegade Water Secrets with Mike Anderson, is a medical researcher, author of The Rave Diet and film maker/producer of “Eating” and “Healing Cancer from the Inside Out.”

Kevin: I am really thrilled about having you because this is just a completely different take on the normal-type calls that we have. Normally we do diet advice, and we’ll talk about the Rave diet, but the film making side of this is just so fascinating and there’s so many things I want to cover, and our readers want to cover as well, so I ‘m just really thrilled to get moving on this.

Mike: OK.

Kevin: What I’d like to do first, there are a bunch of people on this call who probably don’t know who you are, so why don’t you give a brief introduction, just explain who you are and then we’ll get right into the questions.

Mike: OK. Briefly, what happened to me, I was a... my background is in computers. In fact in the 80s I developed the navigational system in your car, made it possible, and I have owned and sold a couple of computer companies and I was a high-flying executive. And what happened was I got burnt out and I just quit everything. I was on the board of directors, I quit everything. I wanted to slow down the world. And what happened, I had no interest in nutrition, what that gave me was the luxury of time to read books I would never have read before.

I stumbled across this and I read a few books and I said, “My God, you can reverse heart disease just by simple changes in diet?” And I thought, “Why don’t I know that?” I was in my mid 50s at that point. And so I thought this should be headline news and I looked around and the books were out there but the knowledge base wasn’t, people just were not
informed. So I thought I would make a little contribution to help spread the word. And so I spent about two years researching the thing and another year putting together the film “Eating.” And that’s how this all began. And now it’s kind of taken on a life of its own.

Kevin: How did you go from you know computers to film making? It doesn’t seem like a direct sort of path.

Mike: No it wasn’t. I had made two fifteen-minute films before, kind of educational films...

Kevin: OK.

Mike: And so I had the tools available and quite honestly, the film, the videography and stuff are not the best to this day but it turned out to be very compelling and I just kind of went with my gut and put it together. And quite honestly when I finished it I thought well maybe if I could get 1500 copies of these out, maybe I could change 1500 lives, and that was the whole point.

Kevin: You’ve gotten more than 1500 out.

Mike: Oh yeah, yeah. It‘s been seen by millions of people, tens of millions of people at this point. It got to the Minister of Health in Ghana, the nation of Ghana in Africa, West Africa, and then it got up to the President, and they liked it so much they aired it on their national television and afterwards the President got on and said, “We will never adopt the American way of eating.” And this was after it had been shown to all the Ghanians. And the reason is because these third world nations, if you’ll excuse the phrase, they’re afraid of our diet, they know it’s going to bankrupt their countries because of the medical costs that such a diet would bring in and so they are really urging people to stick to their traditional diets, a whole, plant- base diet primarily, and avoid the western ways because it would bankrupt them.

Kevin: I never knew that. So what about the film “Eating,” how did you go about researching this in order to make it a compelling argument that wouldn’t be, I mean that didn’t have holes in it? As a researcher that seems to be the most important thing that you could do. So how did you go about doing that?

Mike: Well I you know I had read all the vegetarian authors -- John Robins, Howard Lyman, McDougall, Ornish, Essylstyn a whole host of people and probably a hundred books and a thousand articles. And also I focused in on...you know, I’m from the mainstream then and still am, and I focused in on what people would say to me, because they saw changes in me. I lost 35 pounds and I would tell them the diet I’m on and all the
objections. When you get into social situations people have objections -- “Oh what about protein?” That’s the biggest one, “What about potein?” “What about this, what about that...” And so I tried to answer all of those concerns in this, so they wouldn’t have an argument to come back at me with, so it would be very compelling.

Kevin: What do you think was the most shocking thing that you discovered while researching for that period?

Mike: What really got me on this was, like I say you can reverse heart disease with simple changes of diet, in diet, and I am big with statistics and I know how difficult it is through correlation and stuff like that to prove a causal chain over say 20-30 years, which is what it takes most of these chronic diseases, like heart disease, it takes that long to develop. And you take someone like Neal Pinkey, who I interviewed in the film, and what he did, he was scheduled for emergency bypass operation because his widow-maker, the main artery, was all plugged up, the other two were all plugged up, and he was on the face of death. He turned away from that and simply changed his diet and eight months later he was in an marathon, an eight and a half-mile marathon. Now to me that is cause and effect, that’s controlled. You know exactly what he did, this is not a 20-year time span this is 6 months it took him. And that was the real... it’s kind of a reverse causation thing. That was real compelling to me because there is no argument what he did.

And same with Ornish and the other researchers, Essylstyn. You’ve got a very short time frame, and you’ve got the variables under control. He didn’t do anything else but change his diet, he didn’t quit smoking, he wasn’t a smoker, he didn’t do anything else but change his diet. And look at what happened, it’s just unbelievable. So you get a lot of arguments
about causation and people will give you all kinds of nonsense about what causes heart disease. They’re still arguing about it.

I look at the reverse side, let’s look at reversing a disease and how long it takes and what are the variables you have under control. And that’s what really got me onto this, because you know, I was stunned when I read about it. Geez, simple changes in diet. And it’s happening with cancer now too. And you know, I mean adult onset diabetes, you can reverse it in a week, real severe cases, a couple weeks.

Kevin: Do you have any idea why there is so much confusion?

Mike: Politics, primarily. And there is also an emotional aspect to it. People love their meat. You know, the taste, and what Margaret Mead said, “Changing a man’s religion is easy, changing his diet is harder.” People like their meat, taste is a very personal thing, it’s a very, very difficult thing to do. And what I have learned, because I have converted a lot of people and I have talked to a lot of people about it, some people will not get it, they just will not get it, their minds are so closed. And I won’t even engage them in argument. I will say, “Fine” and move on to someone whose mind is a little more open because I only have a limited amount of time and they’re just going to... they will live with the consequences of their diet and it will catch up with them eventually.

Kevin: Yeah, I’ve heard people say that before. At times, isn’t it a little difficult to do that? Particularly if they’re friends or family.

Mike: Right. It’s not hard for me. It was in the beginning because I didn’t have as much experience with it. But I’ve just found that some people will not change, no matter what and I’m going to move on. So be it. No, that’s all right.

Kevin: OK. Now “Eating” is in its third version, correct?

Mike: Right, right.

Kevin: Was that a technical reason or was there more that you felt you needed to add to it?

Mike: Well, I updated it in certain respects. I added a global warming section on that. It has a section, the second edition had a section of factory farming. And some of the scenes were very brutal. I was showing the conditions of the animals and I deleted that because people were showing it to audiences and they were losing up to half of their audiences. I went to a showing at a hospital and they just, I put up a warning on the screen and say, “If you don’t want to watch this, flip to the next section.” They were flipping to the next section. And I wanted to at least, cover that section because it was very important, but I didn’t want people to leave or make them totally uncomfortable. So, what I did was I deleted that section. I still cover factory farming but in a much more muted way, so that people will get through it; and I want them to get through it and also to the end. A lot of people will just turn it off at that section.

Also, I had accusations that once that is shown, “Oh, this is just some animal rights guy and he’s put together all of these arguments but it’s really for animal rights.” Well, it is but it isn’t. The main thing is health. I think that most people are selfish, they're going to say, “What’s in it for me, this diet? And what can I do?” Very few people are going to change their diet as a result of animal rights concerns, maybe 5% or something of the audience, maybe, maybe less. So I took that out and now you can show the third edition to a church group. It has some uncomfortable scenes that will make people squeamish a little bit, but they're not going to turn it off; they're not going to walk out of the auditorium. That was the big difference. So, it plays to a wider audience because I was getting a lot of complaints about that.