Bookish Club Special: Forks Over Knives

Excerpt from Robert Ebert's review of the movie: "Forks Over Knives" is a documentary in which Lee Fulkerson enacts a mirror image of the journey taken by Morgan Spurlock (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Morgan%20Spurlock&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231) in "Supersize Me." Instead of eating only at McDonald's for a month and nearly killing himself, he eats a plant-based whole food diet for six months, gets off all of his cholesterol and blood pressure medications, drops a lot of weight, sleeps better and has more energy.

His film follows three other sick people: one with breast cancer, one given less than a year to live because of heart problems, one with murderously high cholesterol. All are well again after the vegetarian diet. The movie opens with a warning that no one should take such steps without consulting a physician, and I quite agree; I would not have depended on nutrition to cure my cancer, but I'm convinced that I would always have been healthier if I'd eaten correctly.

The film hammers us with information. It centers on the work of famed nutritionists Dr. T. Colin Campbell (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Colin%20Campbell&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231) of Cornell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn of the Cleveland Clinic. Campbell conducted the awesome China-Oxford-Cor nell study, which fol lowed millions of Chinese over decades and found that increases in their incidence of cancer and heart disease directly paralleled their adoption of a Western diet.

Several book club members were interested in seeing this movie, so we decided to schedule this event, and are inviting everybody to come out and join us!

We'll meet in front of the ticket booth before the movie starts, and also congregate in the lobby after the movie to discuss coffee/snack/dinner options for anybody interested in meeting after the movie.