I used to be a junk food eater in high school including tons of fast food Mcdonalds, Wendy's and weighed about 180lb. In college I added tons of variety and became a serious fitness addict and studied nutrition, adding tons of greens and ideas to my diet. I went to 165lb in sophomore year, and went back up in weight with muscle gains back to 180lb. During my senior year I shifted back to a protein diet because of weight lifting, but I kept up with fruits and low vegetables and high carbs. My diet mostly consisted of very lean meat, ground chicken/ turkey or beef at least 95% lean, tons of fruit smoothies, and subs with vegetables and either roast beef or tuna. After that year at 21 I saw myself and visually felt and looked older. That year I'd already given up drinking alcohol and I never smoked cigarettes. I just looked like my teen years had left behind and I was definitely an adult. Around that time I got injured from weight-lifting and decided very spur of the moment that I'd be a vegetarian around that time for health purposes because of all the information I had been taking in on health and nutrition/ nutritional labels. I spent a lot of time online looking up data on nutritional labels, fats, mono+poly, carbs simple-complex, proteins and their sources. So I had a workout injury prompting me to stop working out for 6 months and lose 3 years of hard workouts and was only eating about 1-2 small meals a day dropping to 155lb. I was eating tuna/ almost no meat about once every 10-14 days vs the traditional cycle of 3.5 oz meat/ day and this was 2010. This only lasted about 4-5 months before I started really turning the corner and getting a lot of grains in my diet and homemmade apple pies and homemmade bread with tons of seeds and variety's of grains. Pizza was my personal favorite, and usually home-made utilizing pizza flour purpose powder and adding water, cheese, tomato sauce. From 2010-summer 2011 I got back up to 200lb and tons of exercise/ working out while only eating approximately 4-5 oz of meat every 10-14 days rather than daily. I regained a lot of my strength gains even as a mostly vegetarian. From that point forward I decided to take an unexpected next step forward towards full vegetarianism. In summer 2012 I took out all meats completely.. and since then (2014) have had 2 cans of tuna worth of meat in 2 years and no land meat. I'm into fitness and feel that it lends no disadvantage to me knowing the proper staple of foods I need to eat and not processed junk.. but just organic, and only lends a long term advantage to avoid long term health risks. It also helps with focus and allows me to stay up at a maintained moderate high energy throughout the day where-as when I was higher on a meat diet, I would NEED to take a nap after I did a workout with no exception. I find meat-substitutes at Whole Foods for Ex. quite good soy-based (not engineered). My diet is heavy on dairy, grains like whole breads, or multi-grain pizza dough, recently more and more vegetables, quesedilla's with guacamole/ salsa/ cheese, sometimes vegan cheese, vegetable soup with added peanuts, yogurt parfait with nuts/ fruits, smoothies, home-brewed tea's, soy- milk, oat grain milk etc. I weigh about 190 lb currently at 25 years old. I believe the most critical line that came from this documentary is "food perspective is like religion," and that was the critical point and defining spectrum on what this documentary was about. I felt the best resource to really take out is a variety is important. The documentary itself tries to promote a Low carb (low grains), High protein (high meats), low dairy, balanced with nuts, vegetables and fruits based on ancestral history. The most interesting point in the documentary for me was when they scaled out ancestral history on the football field, but I felt this contradicted, and didn't support the meat based argument. It showed how much of our history had been hunter- gatherer, but the greatest evolutionary leap was after the agricultural/ industrial revolutions in all intellectual and physical scale. In my perspective I think vegetarianism is a strong choice but the video attempts to de-signify this movement, and information about eating meat linked to heart disease was left out of the video. As humans evolve and have more physical and intellectual resources available to them and live out the fulfillment of an herbavorian, physical complexion it is proved that humans CAN choose to be vegans/ vegetarian's and survive. Whether this is the better option is up for debate but it is possible to be healthy that way, in my belief it is healthier. I believe the biggest issue is facts get filtered through personal feelings/ quests/ wants. The facts are there but what facts are focused on and interpreted and sought for is determined by a personal quest of findings. Take for example Darwinism and creationist theory. During his era he was greatly disputed Darwin, for his beliefs and even physical archaeology and scientific research was used to back up creationist theory in the essence of the "perfection" in innate physiology of for instance fish bone structure that allows for the species to swim and live in harmony in only a way a creator or God could make, that evolution was too random. Well to that point that's why evolution took so many millions of years and time to advance, because of a search of harmony and trial-error and adaptive selection process to physically fulfill a more operable set of tools to handle the environment and life. So, Darwin was heavily opposed, but now mostly seeming to be correct by consensus, and the point is that facts can be interpretable.

Excellent documentary of an idea that seems so simple yet profound: when determining what we should consume, look to how we as humans have lived for the vast majority of the past 2 million years. When viewed through that context, the ideas of eating highly processed foods, eating only vegetables or eating large amounts of grain are the untested and somewhat radical approaches. Yet those diets are what we either consume or are told to consume. I wish the documentary would have explained in more detail that they recommend removing grains and sugars but replacing them with healthy fats. I thought the Primal Diet was about eating more protein but they seam to say that we should replace the sugar and grain calories with more fats including animal fats for optimal health. But otherwise, fast paced for a documentary, well presented information that should be eye-opening to all.

The problem with the conclusion that this documentary comes to is it won't work! If all of humanity—seven billion strong and increasing—ate the "natural" quasi-Paleolithic diet that the scientists in this film find "perfect"...well they won't because with present technology it is impossible for the planet to feed that many people that high on the hog. Raising the necessary number of cows, pigs, chickens, etc. requires more land and fresh water than is available. It's as simple as that.The second problem involves a "what is, is right" kind of fuzzy thinking. The fact that our ancestors ate a lot more meat than they did grains does not mean that sort of diet is best. They ate that way because they had no choice.The third problem is that the kind of meat hunters and gatherers ate was a bit different from the fat-laden, choice cuts of meat eaten today. It was lean and grass-fed. And a lot of it wasn't meat at all. It was fish, shellfish, clams, mussels and insects.Aside from these three very important points the documentary is not bad. The film makes it clear that it is the modern diet of processed foods that is responsible for the obesity epidemic in the developed world. And yes the paleo-primal, hunter-gatherer diet is superior to the junk food that is shoved in our faces on TV, over the Internet, on billboards and at fast food restaurants.And yes meat- and fish-eating turned upright-walking dull-witted apes into hominids. Without high-quality foods we could not have grown our big brains. But that was then. This is now, and what is needed is a balanced diet of whole foods with plenty of fruits and vegetables, some carbs, some high protein foods, and oils from the trees: e.g., olives, avocados, coconuts, etc.—Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"

This documentary is quite shallow at the end, even though there is a real effort to interview serious scientist and to approach the different diets. They go from the extreme no meat to only meat... as some of my peers saidHowever this is the first documentary that is really focused on an evolutionary perspective for diets, and for this, i gave them my two stars. But, the format makes me to a reality TV show, especially for the first half. they seem to be very into "scoop" and sensitization of the informations, which annoyed me quite much i have to say. with the little harp music that often comes... this is really annoying. So i really had a problem with the format.plus the use of the expression by some of the scientists " we are design for...", well as a scientist myself this is... ouch! And one the guy is citing the sphenoid bone which is a the center of the theory of the intelligent design.... For me this documentary is really on the slippery slope and i am wondering if it has not just been made for good traditional American (that is just evolved enough to accept there might be some kind of evolution) to give them weak scientific justifications for they diet.And most of it, there is an important point that they forgot to take in the equation : the impact of the environment.... This is something that our ancestors did not have to deal with.. So yes some of our ancestors ate mainly animal products, but those resources now have such a cost on our environment, which makes me question a lot about the perfection of this diet. If we want to really think about our diet, i think that we are at a point were we need a more broad approach that really embraces more problems that are related to food. They are NEVER talking about the pesticides...!!!! This is why i think this documentary is at the end quite presumptuous, even if the questions it asks is really interesting.