WOW!

I’ve been cruising along here in Florida, doing my thing, teaching yoga, running a business, and watching sunsets.  But over the course of the last week I’ve been hammered every single day by text, email, direct message, you name it, with people asking me if I’ve seen the new Netflix documentary called You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment.

The documentary is about a research study at Stanford Medicine where they took 22 sets of identical twins and placed one on a vegan diet and one on an omnivore diet and then tracked a range of health measures.

It had already been on my radar to watch,  but all of a sudden, I felt like a documentary viewing needed to go to the top of my list so it did, and I watched it. (There are only 4 episodes.)

Then I read some of the online dialogue about it which is exactly what I would expect. The plant-based people are all “I told you so” and the anti-vegans yell the word “bias!”

The study was a very well-designed, randomized control trial and was published in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) a few weeks ago. It has since had several media headlines about the findings, both independent of the documentary and favorable about the vegan diet.

The lead researcher has proven himself very unbiased over many past studies. He is vegan now, but only because he’s seen the results from his prior studies and became led to eat that way. 

I mean, Stanford is known for the quality of research they produce.

The whole experience has had me reflecting on bias though. 

The nutrition study stands on its own. Period. Documentary footage including the horrors of factory farming and climate devastation has nothing to do with this particular study (there are plenty of other ones for those matters). So I think including that the production of this piece does show bias towards a desire for more people to consume a plant-based diet and didn’t necessarily need to be included.

I’ve also been reflecting on my own bias as a writer and creator. Often, when someone cries “bias!” they point at something that was left out. But the reality of creating things for others to consume means that you have to cut things out. That’s where the phrase “cutting room floor” comes from.

 If I wanted to tell you everything I knew about any subject when I write these blog posts, they’d be 20 pages long and you’d have stopped reading anything I write a long time ago.

When I create a course I am very thoughtful about what I put in and what I leave out so that I don’t overwhelm people.

I’d say that the 80/20 rule applies to almost everything I create. I think about my audience, the purpose of what I’m teaching and time constraints. I leave the most important 20% in and take the least important 80% out.

Does that mean I am biased? I certainly hand pick what stays in and what doesn’t… 

In the service of teaching others, or even in investigative reporting, you must make choices. 

Are we all biased? Is someone who yells “bias!” at another pretending that they’re not also biased?

What do you think? Have you seen You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment? Let me know. I’d love to hear your thoughts.