Start with You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, a 2024 Netflix series that follows a Stanford trial you can read for yourself. Two classics are no longer on Netflix in the US: Forks Over Knives and The Game Changers. Cowspiracy and What the Health are still there.
The old version of this page sent you to Netflix for four films. When we checked Netflix’s US title pages in October 2026, two of them, Forks Over Knives and The Game Changers, were marked as not available to watch in the US. Half the list had gone, and the page still promised all four. Forks Over Knives now streams free with ads on another service (details at the end). The list below is the one that holds today, and it is dated, because a streaming catalog moves faster than a blog post gets rewritten.
The series I’d start with follows the same Stanford twins trial we leaned on in our look at whether vegans are healthier than meat eaters, which is why it gets the most room here.
What’s on Netflix in the US right now
You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment is a four-episode limited series from 2024. Netflix describes it as chronicling a Stanford University study of identical twins, with one twin on a vegan diet and the other on an omnivore diet. It follows one trial from start to finish, and that trial is published in full, which is what sets it apart on this list.
Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, from 2014, is about factory farming and the planet’s natural resources, and about why major environmental groups have largely ignored the subject, in Netflix’s own description. It is a climate and land film more than a diet film.
What the Health, from 2017, examines the link between diet and disease and the billions of dollars at stake in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and food industries, in Netflix’s description. It argues a case. Nothing we read for this page ties it to one trial you could check the way the twins series is tied to one, so I’d watch it as an argument and look up any figure before repeating it at the dinner table.
Seaspiracy, from 2021, follows a filmmaker setting out to document the harm humans do to marine species. It belongs on a vegan watch list for the fish, not for diet advice.
Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, a four-episode series from 2023, travels with author Dan Buettner to five communities where people live extraordinarily long lives. It turns up on vegan lists a lot, and it isn’t a vegan show. Blue Zones’ own summary of what those communities eat makes beans the cornerstone and puts meat, mostly pork, at about five times a month in servings of 3 to 4 oz. Plant-heavy, yes. Vegan, no.
What the twins trial found, and what Netflix says it found
The trial behind the series enrolled 22 pairs of identical twins and put one twin from each pair on a healthy vegan diet and the other on a healthy omnivorous diet for eight weeks. Meals were delivered for the first four weeks, and the twins made their own for the last four. The vegan twins’ LDL cholesterol fell 13.9 mg/dL more than their omnivore siblings’, their fasting insulin 2.9 μIU/mL more, and they lost 1.9 kg more weight. Both groups lost some weight. The authors concluded that the healthy vegan diet led to improved cardiometabolic outcomes compared with a healthy omnivorous diet.
Netflix’s own write-up, a year after the series, goes further. The study found, it says, that “after only eight weeks, the twins eating the plant-based diet experienced an increase in life expectancy,” along with less visceral fat, a lower risk of heart disease and a heightened sex drive. The paper’s primary and secondary outcomes were LDL cholesterol, other blood fats, glucose, insulin, TMAO, vitamin B12 and body weight. Life expectancy isn’t among them, and the paper lists the eight-week length and the lack of a follow-up period among the study’s limitations.
The nearest thing in the published work is a second paper on the same trial. It found significant decreases in overall epigenetic age acceleration in the vegan twins, meaning a blood-based estimate of biological age ran less far ahead of calendar age, and it linked the short-term vegan diet to epigenetic age benefits and to reduced calorie intake. Its authors also write that the difference may come mainly from the vegan twins’ weight loss rather than from the diet alone. We went through that one in whether vegans look older. A clock in your blood is not a lifespan.
The first paper is careful on the same point. The study was not designed to keep calories equal, so the authors write that the LDL changes cannot be separated from the weight lost during the study.
The case against learning nutrition from television
The strongest case against this whole list comes from the trial’s own limitations section. The twins were generally healthy adults, the sample was 44 people, the study ran eight weeks with no follow-up, and the authors note that diversity in education and socioeconomic status was lacking. If the best-evidenced series on Netflix rests on that, the argument goes, a documentary is the wrong place to learn nutrition at all, and the right place is the papers, read slowly and without a soundtrack.
A skeptic will add one more line from the paper. Its senior author disclosed funding from Beyond Meat outside this study. The trial itself was funded by the Vogt Foundation, a Stanford clinical research grant and a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant, and the paper says the funders had no role in its design or analysis.
I think that case is right about evidence and wrong about the films. A documentary is a reason to go and look something up. The twins series is the one on this list where looking it up leads straight to the trial it follows, limitations and all, and I’d rather someone reached a JAMA paper through a Netflix series than never reached it.
Where the two that left Netflix went
Forks Over Knives, from 2011, is free to stream on Tubi with ads, and to rent or buy on Amazon or iTunes, according to its own site. The Game Changers is off Netflix in the US, and its website wouldn’t load for us when we checked, so we won’t guess where it streams now. If you’d rather own the two that stayed, Cowspiracy sells a $4.95 download and a $19.95 DVD on its site, and What the Health’s own site sends viewers to Vimeo on Demand. Prices on the film sites were read in October 2026 and change.
The part I’m least sure about is how long any of this stays true. Everything above is what Netflix’s US pages showed in October 2026, two of the four films this page used to recommend had already left, and I’d check a title page before planning a movie night around any of them. The detail from the twins paper I’d most like a series to have shown is a small one: the vegan twins’ vitamin B12 levels fell more than their siblings’ over the eight weeks, by a margin the authors found nonsignificant. It’s why I’d pair any of these films with our guide to whether vegans need B12.
Sources
- Netflix US, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment (2024 limited series, 4 episodes)
- Netflix Tudum, the twins from the Stanford study a year later (2 Jan 2025)
- Landry et al., Cardiometabolic effects of omnivorous vs vegan diets in identical twins, JAMA Network Open 2023 (full text)
- Netflix US, Forks Over Knives (2011): not available to watch in the US
- Netflix US, The Game Changers (2018): not available to watch in the US
- Netflix US, Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)
- Netflix US, What the Health (2017)
- Netflix US, Seaspiracy (2021)
- Netflix US, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones (2023, 4 episodes)
- Blue Zones, Power 9: the plant slant and meat about five times a month
- Dwaraka et al., epigenetic impact of vegan vs omnivorous diets in the Twins Nutrition Study, BMC Medicine 2024
- Forks Over Knives, the film: free on Tubi with ads, rent or buy on Amazon or iTunes
- Cowspiracy official site: $4.95 download, $19.95 DVD
- What the Health official site: watch online through Vimeo on Demand
