interview by Joseph Roberts

photo: Dzianis Miraniuk

Despite the billions of dollars of funding and research into new so-called cures, people continue to suffer from a raft of chronic ills and everyday maladies. Patching up an over-toxic and over-indulgent population with a host of toxic therapies and nutrient sparse foods is not helping the situation. In a personal quest of discovery, James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch set out on an independent mission to uncover the wholesome truth, ultimately producing and directing the documentary film Food Matters.

The film seeks to uncover the business of disease and, at the same time, explore the safe, cheap and effective use of nutrition and supplementation for preventing and often reversing the underlying causative aspects of illness. The Food Matters duo has independently funded the film to remain as unbiased as possible, delivering a clear and concise message to the world – food matters.

Joseph Roberts: What inspired you to produce Food Matters?

James Colquhoun: The biggest single motivator for us was personal experience. My father was quite unwell at the time. He was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety and depression and not responding well to a raft of medications. He was suffering quite severely from the side effects. That spurred our personal interest in sourcing alternatives for healing and looking at the source of the problem, as opposed to masking symptoms which medications often do.

That led us to study at the Global College of Natural Medicine. We were quite surprised that many others are familiar with the concept that you can eat well to prevent illness. We also discovered that nutritional therapy and detoxification processes can reverse illness – heart disease, diabetes, depression, cancer and mental illness. That was a really big turning point for us and we were quite motivated to inform as wide a population as possible.

JR: Which basic principles did you discover?

JC: Metabolic illnesses play a part in just about every illness that exists – you have an over-toxicity and a lack of nutrients. These can be caused by any number of things, but in order to reverse these illnesses, we need to look at detoxifying the body and replenishing nutrients. Those concepts basically facilitate our bodies to create balance and self-heal. Everyone is familiar with how your body heals itself when you cut yourself or if you have some sort of scar. It’s not such a different concept whether you have a cut on your arm or heart disease or diabetes and so forth. Once you restore balance to the body and give it the environment that creates optimum health and balance, it will regenerate and self-heal.

James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch

Laurentine ten Bosch: Our society has become so used to instant gratification as a way of life that we always look at the symptoms first – how we can tackle them and the quickest way to overcome them. The pharmaceutical industry knows how to approach the instant gratification society very well. Many of the teachers in our film, however, are looking at how we can resolve the underlying cause, rather than just fixing the symptoms.

JR: How did you get interested in these issues?

LB: A lot of our family was overcome by illness and we’d both been working in fields where we regularly dealt with a lot of people. I was working in the food service industry and we realized that we weren’t really looking at what we were putting into people’s mouths.

JR: In 2000, Studio D of the National Film Board produced the documentary The Genetic Takeover. Common Ground rented a theatre and showed the film to hundreds of people. Following the film, we had a Q & A with a panel of spokespeople from Greenpeace, the Society Preventing Environmental Conservation, Western Canada Wilderness Committee, Sierra Club and others.

LB: People are hosting screenings of our film all over the world through the Brave New Theatre platform. We’ve teamed up with this company and people everywhere can register to host a screening, anywhere – in their living rooms or a community centre or a cinema or a church. [See www.foodmatters.tv/]

JR: That helps build community too.

LB: We’ve got a lot of screenings in America – all over the East and West coasts –in Canada, even Australia and New Zealand are really coming along. Even places we haven’t marketed to like Norway and Tel Aviv and Israel.

JR: What do you feel passionate about nowadays?

JC: We’re as passionate as ever about having this message heard by as many people as possible. We believe that if one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population watch this film, we can create a shift in conscious awareness surrounding nutrition and natural healing. We would really love our message to be so widely heard that it can create that shift. We’d love to see our film used in conjunction with other media and information sources as a means to shift regulatory bodies and governments. If individuals demand nutritional therapy and ask for these approaches to healing, we can essentially shift the industry away from a sickness-based model to a wellness-based model. It’s extremely fulfilling for us to be a part of that process and that message.

JR: Why did you call the film Food Matters?

JC: We had a number of other titles for the film, but it actually originated with a comment from David Wolfe, the raw food commentator in the film. During our interview with him, he said that we now realize that food does matter; food matters.

JR: What is your position on Frankenfoods?

JC: Our stance on genetically modified foods is similar to that of Arnaud Apoteker, the head of the anti-genetically modified foods campaign for Greenpeace. He says that this manipulation of the environment and of food is a huge biological experiment on a global scale that cannot be controlled and is extremely dangerous. It’s a risk we should not be taking. The single most important thing that each country should adhere to is the clear labelling of genetically modified foods. If people had the choice of organic, all-natural foods versus genetically engineered, heavily processed foods and the labels delineated the two, I’m certain they would veer away from Frankenfoods.

LB: We have the same issue in Australia. We’ve just been notified that our country is now more open to genetically modified foods, which is a big shame for the farmers who are growing organic food and trying to promote it. Although we would have loved to, we weren’t able to focus on it in our film; it would have made for a very long film.

JR: Is the government in Australia similar to Canada, in that it is run by very large corporations with a lot of clout?

JC: Every governmental body globally is lobbied by interest groups and the more effective they are, the more they can change legislation in their favour. The most effective ones are those with the biggest pockets, and the companies with the biggest pockets seem to be the agro-chemical companies and pharmaceutical companies. That’s why the decisions that are made predominantly support the multi-nationals, whose interests are not necessarily for the health of the general public.

As individuals, we have an opportunity to shift consumer choices. Laurentine and I like to talk about “flirting with your shopping trolley.” If people support sustainability, organics, biodynamics, sustainable farming and foods that support health, corporations will quickly shift to make sure there’s enough supply. Hopefully, we can create change from the bottom up instead of from the governmental level down. Our focus is on intellectual distribution. We’re concerned with distributing good, solid information to as wide an audience as possible. People contact us every day saying this has changed their lives or they’ve used the information in conjunction with a holistic practitioner to be able to correct their depression or their other illnesses. These sorts of responses are very gratifying.

JR: You provide a forum for many different groups in the film with various approaches to diet – vegetarians and non-vegetarians, vegans, people into raw food. The common thread is that people can improve their health and recover from diseases caused by poor food and lifestyle choices or toxic, environmental poisoning.

JC: Our message is to spread the good news that there are other opportunities for healing outside of the conventional realm for people who are suffering from illness or pain. The more this knowledge spreads, the more people will have access to life-saving information, which is the most fulfilling role we can play.

We’re really excited about people taking our message to the world through the platforms we’ve set up on our website; people can purchase a copy of the film and hold screenings in their local communities. They can also purchase wholesale copies for families or friends. We’ve had so many wonderful people step up and help with this. We really hope this will continue to create a shift in consciousness about how we interact with nutrition and wellness.

LB: I’d like to add that we started from a grave concern for people who are ill and who don’t know where to turn. In America, you get bombarded by advertising. It’s a capitalist society and marketing goes on everywhere. We were quite concerned for people who are ill. Doctors don’t have time to talk about nutrition and opportunities. They don’t have enough time to teach and hold hands.

We looked at the opportunities for people from a truth-seeking perspective – what really works and which modalities are getting results. That’s why we’re very lucky to have studied at the Global College of Natural Medicine, an independent organization with no government funding so you don’t see the influences of the meat and dairy boards and pharmaceutical companies. We were lucky to have these teachers speak to us through the college.

JR: How do people find out about the college?

LB: It’s online at www.gcnm.com, based out of Santa Cruz, California. You can study their programs from all over the world. We were fortunate to be able to learn from them. It was these teachers who inspired us.