| Good morning, everybody. I got a great email the other day with a good idea for a Sunday with Sisson. (BTW, folks, share your questions and ideas you'd like me to take up in these Sunday chats. I'm all ears.) Hi Mark, Would you be willing to do a bit on this new documentary on Netflix called Game Changers? In short – Arnold Schwarzenegger, some MMA fighters, several bodybuilders (including one that carried the heaviest weight ever in the Guinness Book of World Records), and half the Tennessee Titans are claiming that plant-based only diet is the reason for their success. Some things that stand out to me that I would like to question are:
-Soy doesn’t produce estrogen but produces phytoestrogen, which looks similar to estrogen but actually binds to other estrogens, lowering your actual estrogen uptake.
-Vitamin B12 isn’t received from meat, it’s actually received from bacteria present in the soil and really everybody should get there vitamin B12 from supplementation rather than their food. Is there any way you could debunk this and/or discuss the research behind this in the claims? -Mike Thanks for the question, Mike. The thing about documentaries is they can be extremely persuasive. Rather than blog posts written in a day or two, or Twitter responses that take a minute to write, documentary makers spend years crafting their content, editing their footage, and making the very best argument they can. Plus, it's full of real-life humans with expressive faces and strong reputations (Arnold) telling you what they want you to believe, often with a powerful soundtrack swelling in the background and guiding your emotional response. You sit in front of it and feast on the audiovisual mastery. There's no time to make a rebuttal. It's totally convincing. It's designed to be. Let's just get right into those two arguments. Last week, I talked about the silliness of the penis ring study from The Game Changers. These other things are almost as silly. First, the soy phytoestrogen being different from estrogen argument... Sure, phytoestrogen isn't exactly the same as estrogen. There are differences. But when the rubber hits the road, when you look at men who eat the most soy, they have the lowest sperm count. When you give soy protein isolate to healthy men every day for weeks, their testosterone declines. I'm no enemy of fermented soy. Natto, for instance, is a great source of vitamin K2. But the idea that soy protein can replace or even measure up to animal protein is nonsense. It's better than nothing, if you insist on avoiding animal protein (although pea is probably better), but it's not the same, let alone superior. Second, the B12 argument... This is just embarrassing. I'm actually flummoxed. What is the argument, exactly? That the meat we eat is contaminated with soil-based bacteria, and that's the only reason it contains B12? Then why isn't dirty produce a good source of B12? Why isn't the argument that we should just clean our fingernails with our teeth (don't tell me—there's some vegan author out there making that argument, isn't there?)? Then why are shellfish a good source of B12? Hell, why are they some of the best sources? There's not a lot of soil contamination in oysters and clams. Okay, let's give them that argument—that meat isn't an intrinsic source of B12, that it only comes from soil contamination on said meat. Who cares? Aren't we still getting vitamin B12 from the meat if we eat it? I really don't follow. The important part is that meat-eaters have better B12 statuses than non-meat-eaters. Oh, and the idea that Arnold got where he was with a plant-based diet is the height of silliness. Here he is tucking into a huge steak: | 
