Patron Pick – Hack Your Health

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut (2024)
Directed by Anjali Nayar

In an ongoing battle to make me watch the oddest things we have, Hack Your Health is a Netflix documentary about the digestive system and its connection to the body. The educational film is hosted by Dr. Giulia Enders, MD, a German scientist studying digestive health and working towards her doctorate in gastroenterology. Enders and other talking heads in fields like neuropsychology, epidemiology, neuroscience, and microbiology share their perspective on how our diets affect our digestion, which has a domino effect on the rest of our health. There are some wild takes here coming after a first half that feels like basic elementary school science.

The film shows us how diversely populated our gut biomes are using colorful stop-motion animation. If you thought the rainforest was teeming with life, you should check out your intestines, an even larger jungle. Through these simple animations, the film shows how diets of nutrient-rich food have a positive effect as low-nutrition foods deplete our biomes. Pretty straightforward, and I hope most adults already know this. One of the interesting ideas posited by a neuroscientist is that our gut is as crucial to our functioning as our brain, and what happens during digestion can affect the same functions our brain is typically seen as solely controlling.

Despite the film’s title, there’s no fast-acting solution to the problem. The common refrain is consistently eating a balanced diet, with most of your food coming from produce with plentiful fiber. If you do that, you’ll have a healthy gut. That’s common sense, but the film never addresses how difficult that can be. In U.S. society, people are inundated with junk food at all times. Having been out of the States for over three years, every time I come across a TikTok account that showcases new junk food coming to stores, it is overwhelming. Every flavor combination of everything is being made and thrown at the wall to see if it sticks.

While I may know what is good for my health, the snack food manufacturers are allowed to put ingredients in their products that spur addiction. It’s been found that Oreos activate more neurons in the human brain when consumed than morphine or cocaine. High-fat & high-sugar foods are very likely to get you hooked in a way similar to the bad kind of drugs. I know I’m addicted to soft drinks because of the sugar but also the caffeine. There’s even something that hooks you with the carbonation. I’ve tried several other beverages that have some of the traits I like about soda without as many of the adverse side effects, but the minute Dr. Pepper or Coke hits these lips, I am reminded why I love them so, despite how bad they are for me. For people to best control their diets, we need a government willing to rigidly regulate the food industry.

I did have to look away from the screen during the last third of the film as they started showing some poop and a lot of it. The film talks about the importance of analyzing waste to learn about health. In an utterly ludicrous turn, one man begins taking capsules containing poop which is a no-go for me, folks. But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part about this documentary is how it chooses to talk about autism. As it lists things that can be remedied with good gut health, they dropped autism onto the list. This continues a warped discourse that chooses to view autism as an affliction that must be cured. That would be a form of eugenics. Now it’s a very cozy, corporate, seemingly friendly form of it on the surface and how this is presented, but the idea that autism can be “cured” is straight out of the Nazi playbook.

As an autistic person, I can say that I have more digestive issues than the average person, but it’s not the source of my autism. I find that it’s caused as a result of the anxiety I’ve developed from the trauma I’ve experienced throughout my childhood. My digestive health issues arise when I feel anxiety about going to a new setting, particularly one where there will be a lot of people I don’t know and/or could very easily be overstimulated. My sensory issues with food have caused me to be pickier than the average bear, and that is certainly connected to my autism, not the cause of it. The cause of autism is a brain that prunes and develops at a different rate & pace than what we have labeled neurotypical.

Apparently, many pro-autism groups have asked Netflix to remove this documentary for its peddling of false science, yet it remains available for anyone to stream. Plenty of autistic people eat diets of processed food, likely because of their consistency as opposed to produce, which can vary. I love strawberries, but I can feel that sensory dissonance when I bite into one that isn’t quite as firm as I expected. You can likely find plenty of autistic children raised in households where parents worked to make healthy food compatible with their sensory issues. They are still autistic despite this.

So much of the “science” you see pop up about autism in productions such as these can often be traced to studies that were funded by interests that wanted to sell a product. This particular myth was popularized by Andrew Wakefield, the criminal scientist who pushed that MMR vaccines are the cause of autism, and he used poor gut health, saying it was a symptom caused by the shot. Despite thorough and constant debunking of Wakefield’s lies, these myths persist. I feel very sorry for the autistic children whose parents buy this bullshit and put their kids through hell rather than just learn how to better communicate and provide for their offspring.