Writer: Peter Chai

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Watch this if you liked: “Super Size Me”

Directed by Lee Fulkerson, "Forks Over Knives" is an American documentary that follows how two aging medical figures, nutritional scientist Dr. T. Colin Campbell and surgeon Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn who promote a plant-based diet in order to help human beings around the world to prevent or battle chronic diseases that attack our systems, thus giving us a new way of maintaining health and attaining longevity in today's toxic society.

The sequence of the film is kind of confusing to watch as Fulkerson presents scenes that show his own real-life experiences of appointments and treatments with physicians in between detailed explanations and statements made by both Campbell and Esselstyn regarding their years of groundbreaking studies on plant-based food as medicine for their American patients. Audiences must pay their full attention from the beginning until the end of the film in order to understand the whole scenario of the possibilities of vegetables replacing animal-based food including dairy products in our daily eating habits.

Regardless of how interested you are in health-related subjects, spending more than an hour in a cinema to witness how Americans ate themselves into obesity and their transition of simple but protein-rich food to consuming oily and high cholesterol food is dry enough to make you think twice on whether there is a need for us to see something that we can actually watch it on our television set at home.

However, you can see that Fulkerson works very hard to globalize the health topic by bringing in mentions of what Americans had done in the past to bridge a connection with foreign countries to make better health research. One of the most attractive parts is looking at Campbell's journey to China back in the 1980s to conduct the successful China-Cornell Oxford Project with Chinese researcher Chen Junshi to examine the lifestyle of thousands of residents and characteristics of diseases from 65 states in China statistically.

On the other hand, Dr. Esselstyn has his own highlights in the documentary when several of his patients including an overweight African-American lady and a Chinese male immigrant in the United States who came to the New York-born doctor for medical help. It is inspiring to listen to respective patients telling their stories on how they stopped diseases like diabetes and heart attacks by following the vegetarian menu suggested by Esselstyn.

"Forks Over Knives" might not provide an incredible cinematic experience with its story but the topics it deals with can be a wake-up call and lifesaver in seeing why food matters.

Cinema Online, 02 January 2013