Viewpoint: 5 popular Netflix documentaries serve up pseudoscience about agriculture, chemicals and nutrition

cowspriacy

Netflix brought in $15.8 billion in revenue in 2018 in part because the streaming service floods subscribers with a deluge of binge-worthy content. That’s all fine and well when the show is Stranger Things or The Great British Baking Show, but when it’s a media production that mangles science and spreads misinformation, it’s a problem. Unfortunately, Netflix hosts a variety of documentaries that do just that. Here are the worst offenders:

Cowspiracy. Did you know that animal agriculture is the leading contributor to climate change, responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions, more than fossil fuel energy as well as any other factor? No? Good. Because it’s completely untrue. This is the lie at the heart of Cowspiracy, which claims that if the world’s population “simply” went vegan, we’d save the planet.

More nuanced, evidence-based evaluations find that eliminating meat from our collective diet actually wouldn’t be as beneficial as claimed. Pesticide production would have to go way up to make up for all the lost fertilizer in the form of manure, and many more people would face nutritional deficiencies.

Read full, original article: The Five Most Anti-Science Documentaries on Netflix

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