My review of Fed Up
In recent years, a number of powerful food documentaries have set out
to pull the proverbial wool from our eyes and expose big agriculture
and the Monsanto monster for what it is. Despite the glut of information
available, however, making sense of the piecemeal data can be
confounding. Fed Up, directed by Stephanie Soechtig and narrated
by Katie Couric, is a rather cogent contribution despite covering some
familiar ground.
Fed Up focuses on childhood obesity and its concomitant
illnesses: Type 2 Diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Type 2 Diabetes
amongst adolescents has gone from being non-existent in the ’80s to a
staggering number of 57,638 cases today. The film follows three
teenagers as they struggle to lose weight.
The film does an admirable job of definitively hammering the nail
into the coffin of the “eat less, exercise more” myth of weight loss
that has permeated public consciousness for so long. The fallacy of “all
calories are the same” is conclusively laid to rest here as well, using
the example of a soft drink vs. almonds, the fiber in which causes them
to be digested qualitatively differently and cause much less of a spike
in blood sugar and insulin levels. Similarly to sodas, juices also have
no fiber, and the film argues that they’re essentially the same (makes
you want to toss your Odwallas, huh?). With that, Fed Up also
aims to squarely take on the personal responsibility model of obesity
and supplant it by the disease model of drug addiction. “Food addiction
is a biological fact,” states one of the many pundits in the film. In
the same way that drugs can hijack neural pathways, so can hyper
palatable foods (the study of the cocaine-addicted rats who consistently
chose sugar water over cocaine is referenced).
So, what is making us fat? Fed Up points the finger at sugar,
while also addressing the other co-variables. In 1977, the McGovern
Report, strongly cautioned against the consumption of refined sugars.
The sugar lobby fought vehemently against these standards, in the end
succeeding in their removal from the report. The 1980s saw the rise of
America’s obsession with a low-fat diet. The fat, predictably, was
replaced with sugar. Since 1977, daily consumption of sugar has doubled.
There are currently 600,000 products in the marketplace with sugar in
them. The pundits in the movie do bring up a very hotly-contested topic —
namely, they argue that a sugar calorie *is* a sugar calorie.
Essentially, honey is just as bad as high-fructose corn syrup, they
argue. While not exactly scientifically confirmed beyond doubt, this is
certainly food for thought. Another fallout of the low-fat fixation: the
explosion of the cheese industry. Once all the fat was removed from
milk to make it skim, the dairy industry, in a stroke of Machiavellian
genius, ramped up its cheese production, and spun cheese into the new
“protein food,” causing a huge spike in cheese sales.
Fed Up argues that while the food lobby is incredibly
powerful, the sugar lobby is especially so because with the creation of
cheap additives like high-fructose corn syrup, the companies had a
vested interested in keeping America (and especially its children)
sugar-addicted. One of the scariest statistics in the film (and there
were quite a few) is that we should be consuming between 6-9 teaspoons
of sugar a day, and most American easily eat 4 times that amount. When
the World Health Organization released its 916 TRS report in 2002, it
unequivocally identified sugar as the cause of most metabolic diseases
and set the limit to 10 percent of calories as sugar consumption. By the
time (surprise) the food lobby was done with this, the WHO was forced
to amend that to the alarmingly high 25 percent.
Fed Up also thoroughly explores the inherent conflict of
interest facing the USDA: they must safeguard public health yet promote
the food industry. It also delves into the bigger structural forces at
play: how budget cuts in the National School Lunch Program during the
Reagan era caused most school cafeterias to purchase their meals from
fast food companies and not prepare food themselves. Fed Up takes
a hard look at Michelle Obama’s “Let's Move” campaign, which while
well-intentioned, just did not have the teeth to stand up to the food
company lobby which quickly cried out with reductionistic “Nanny State”
objections. By focusing mostly on one half of the problem, exercise, it
largely ignored just how badly the deck is stacked against children’s
ability to make sensible food choices. As one speaker put it rather
succinctly, “Junk is still junk even if it is less junky.” The companies
paid only so much lip service to improving their products, the film
argues. Junk food marketing, especially to children, remained
egregiously non-curtailed.
Not every data point in Fed Up is ground-breaking, but its
focus on sugar certainly is. Ultimately, the film argues that as long as
we allow private profit to be in charge of public health, we are in
trouble, but knowing the facts about what one is eating is a sure first
step in revolutionizing food industry and our role in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment