Films / Movies / Films About Diet and Food

Documentary Food Matters – Let Food Be Thy Medicine

by Jennie Richards · Published June 25, 2016 · Updated June 15, 2017

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said in 431 B.C., “Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.”

The documentary Food Matters examines how modern medicine today is falling short in healing and curing chronic diseases that are becoming increasingly predominant in our Western society, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and auto-immune disorders. Our modern agriculture system is producing food sprayed with toxic insecticides, pesticides, fungicides and chemicals that are contaminating our food and causing cancer and disease. Our packaged food companies are producing refined, nutritionally depleted foods made with additives, preservatives, dyes and chemicals causing malnutrition and chronic illness. The film prompts each of us to question the trillion-dollar profit motive of the medical-pharmaceutical-agriculture-insurance complex of industries and their drive for ever higher revenues and profit margins, as an effective way to treat and heal disease. Food Matters emphasizes how this complex of industries doesn’t gain from people being healthy, but instead, gains only from keeping people sick and chronically ill. Food Matters suggests that maybe one reason why the medical profession never looks to integrating healthy food and nutrition into a health regimen is if people were healthy—all of these industries would suffer financially and profit margins would fall dramatically.

The film’s producers traveled the world, spending their entire life’s savings, to interview medical doctors, medical researchers, nutritionists, nutrition scientists and wellness experts to explore verifiable solutions for curing diseases naturally instead of with pills, chemicals, surgery and damaging costly medical treatments. Experts who were interviewed claim that our system of agriculture with all its pesticides, insecticides, chemicals and toxins and the packaged food industry producing poor quality foods are partly to blame for the staggering rate of chronic disease today, as is our poor diet full of the wrong foods–meat, dairy, sugar, saturated fat and processed foods.

Food Matters argues there’s a better way to get healthy and stay healthy and that is by eating a whole foods, plant-based, organic, raw foods diet full of healthy nutrition that leads to maintaining optimal health and natural healing. The film asks us to reevaluate our indoctrination that we have grown up with—believing modern medicine and pharmacology is the answer to our health problems, and instead look to natural, healthy whole food, good nutrition and supplemental vitamins as a more effective, less harmful, less invasive approach to gaining and maintaining overall health.

Some Quotes from the Film

“When in doubt use nutrition first.”

“Good health makes a lot of sense but it doesn’t make a lot of dollars.”

“80-90% of the reason people go to the hospital is related to their poor state of nutrition.”

“A lot of people are beginning to realize that conventional medicine just isn’t working.”

“The precedent was set by Dr. Max Gerson, with vitamins and large quantities of vegetables and fresh fruits and organic foods that would help reverse cancer. Gerson had a 50% cure rate from cancer. Medical schools do not talk about these alternatives.”

“The 5-year or better survival rate for cancer has not changed in 40 years, after extensive research. Cancer remains our #2 killer, second only to heart disease in the U.S. Cancer is a $200 billion a year industry that you would have to dismantle if the truth ever came out about this industry and how it treats the disease.”

“I think people need education not medication.”

“I feel that the best doctor in the world is you. People should stop being patients and start being people. Eat right and you will feel better, look better, live longer, save money, and you have the enormous satisfaction that you have done it yourself. The single biggest reason people aren’t doing this is because it requires responsibility.”

“We live in a society where the public has come to accept the whole idea taking a pill — to fix an ill.”

“All drugs are toxic to the liver, bar none.”

“Heart disease and cancer are the top two killers in the U.S. annually and make up almost 50% of all deaths.”

“What would happen if everybody ate lots of fresh organic food that wasn’t processed? I think we would have an epidemic of good health. I think the stock market would tremble. There is no money in good health. See good health makes great sense, but it doesn’t make a lot of dollars for doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and food companies.”

“Most people in the West face chronic disorders—like depression, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and they go on for a long period of time. And these are the conditions that all of the drugs target, but these are the conditions that drugs don’t treat very well.”

“Doctors receive little if any training in nutrition.”

“It is illegal in most countries to treat cancer patients around the world with nutritional therapy. The only legal treatments in these countries are surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy.”

“Less than 6% of graduating physicians in the U.S.A. receive any formal training in nutrition.”

“We do know for a fact that a diet comprised of 80% raw, plant-based whole food is a massively valuable part of a healthy, abundant lifestyle.”

“The old ways aren’t working, we need to go back to the basics, we need to return to the way that civilizations that are living the longest and without disease—do, and do what they are doing by living on a plant-based, whole foods diet—and it’s being ignored.”

“Not considering nutrition seriously, we’ve done a terrible disservice to all these people.”

“Chronic malnutrition is what’s going on. You’re not supposed to be tired in the afternoon.”

“Raw foods should be a part of everyone’s diet.”

“Vitamins enable the body to heal itself.”

“25% of all deaths in the U.S. are from cardiovascular disease. And the first symptom is death. Then it’s too late for bypass surgery and drugs. And yet, we’re doing billions of bypass surgeries per year. Why don’t all cardiologists recommend a plant-based diet, vegetarian approach to heart disease instead? Well, because there’s no profit in that!”

“The medical profession only treats disease, they don’t know or understand the primary cause of that disease. They treat symptoms, and as long as you treat symptoms, you’re not going to cure the disease.”

“Long term, difficult chronic diseases—medicine completely misses the boat, because medicine does nothing to address the root cause and change the cause.”

“Cardiovascular disease is a lifestyle disease. Eating too much of the wrong thing—meat, saturated fat, sugar and fast food.”

“Doctors say ‘I don’t believe in vitamins.’ But it’s about facts—it’s not about belief. There have only been a total of 10 deaths attributed to vitamins, but that is even unproven. The very thing that will help people is actually presented as dangerous.”

“You are what you eat. Every single person in the world knows this, every culture, every language, every country, every person knows it. Food does matter.”

“The fertilizer today is mainly made up of only three minerals, NPK – nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Well that’s nice, but our soil requires approximately 52 different minerals, so where is the zinc, calcium, iron, and all the minerals that need to be in the soil. When the plant is deficient in minerals they weaken, and disease and bugs attack them. So the farmers come crying to the chemical companies, who are happy to sell them pesticides, insecticides, and every other thing imaginable.”

“When the body heals, it heals everything. You can’t heal one disease and keep two other diseases. It doesn’t matter what you call the disease. When the body heals, it heals the entire body.”

“We need a new paradigm. Boosting health has not been tried yet, it’s really the only thing we haven’t done.”

“The war against cancer has been fought with one arm behind the back by restricting cancer treatment and research to drugs, radiation, chemotherapy approaches, and leaving out nutrition—we’ve done a disservice to cancer patients.”

“We must make nutrition the primary prevention strategy for the population. You are what you eat, you are everything you’ve ever done to yourself, it all looks different when you get to your 40s and 50s when you start getting chronic illnesses.