A Healthy Diet For Constructive Thinking

Netflix produced a documentary called The Game Changers. It was a pro-vegan documentary that suggested you would get much better health outcomes if you ate only plant-based foods.

What do you think of when I say a person is Vegan? Vegetables? Animal-Free Consumption? Healthy? Maybe, along with a few others things.

The Game Changers took some people that were on a lot of medically prescribed drugs and got them to eat a vegan diet and their health improved.

There is also another documentary on Netflix called What The Health. It is a pro-meat documentary. It suggested that you would get much better health outcomes if you ate more meat and animal-based products.

When someone is on a Carnivore diet, what comes to mind? Meat? Animal Fats? Protein? Healthy? Maybe, along with a few other things.

What The Health took some people that were on a lot of medically prescribed drugs and got them to eat a vegan diet and their health improved.

Sound familiar?

How do these vehemently opposed diet choices teach us about our decision-making bias and how we can get on better with people we disagree with?

What To Eat?

Veganism and the Carnivore diet feel like they are as radically different as you can get. One is purely animal free the other is purely animal.

If you look at the outcomes of their decisions superficially you would come to a quick conclusion that they are very different, but the nuance is that they are eerily similar in how they approach the problem.

Under a deeper investigation, these two camps have more in common than you would think, and why the outcomes of their documentaries both helped unhealthy patients.

What are their drivers and values?

Both documentaries looked at our modern diet, saw that people were unhealthy and wanted to figure out a way to eat better to overcome some of the modern health problems.

A noble goal for sure. The starting point for both camps was to improve the health and well-being of their fellow man. I think both tribes start with a lot in common.

What they do now is to start to form their tribes. Animal bad, animal good. This is where it all goes wrong.

Tribal Blindness

Both diets had improved health outcomes over the modern diet. This is a great outcome any way you look at it. They both started to believe that their decision was right i.e animal bad, animal good.

What they didn’t figure out was that the health outcomes didn’t come from the specific diet but from the general trend of removing processed food to whole foods.

Both tribes wanted to help but they got so wrapped up in believing their way was the right way they alienated the other group that believed in basically everything the other side did but the conclusion.

Build Cohesion

Focusing on outcomes rather than on thinking through the process and aligning values with potential outcomes can create division.

As a leader, you want to get the most people you can who share your vision aligned.

If the two diet camps focused on the shared desire for health outcomes they could have supported each other but they splinted into the dogma of being right now helping the most people.

Focus on building the values you want your team to embody and constantly work on what unites the team, rather the very specific which will start to fracture the team.