Last night while attending a local high school wellness event I finally saw the movie, Fed Up, from Katie Couric, Laurie David (Oscar winning producer of An Inconvenient Truth) and director Stephanie Soechtig. Although this movie will change how you look at most of the food found in supermarkets (i.e., processed foods and anything that ends up in a package), it does little to actually assist you in finding and implementing solutions and is completely uninspiring. The lack of solutions and guidance is a huge shortfall in light of the fact that the movie goes to great lengths to discuss how sugar is as equally addicting as cocaine. Understandably, the backgrounds and strengths of these filmmakers shine through – that is of news and uncovering hidden truths – but that alone does not make up for the movie’s shortfalls.
In a news expository style, Fed Up offers up quite a bit of information about the food industry mixed with superficial touches of nutrition using interviews with numerous PhDs and Doctors interspersed with vignettes of morbidly obese teens and their families. The problem and emotion that goes hand-in-hand with childhood obesity are on full display making our anger with the villains – the food industry, our regulating entities and the big business media – swell. But is that enough? Is anger enough for the average family and teens to implement changes?
Learning how the advent of “low fat” foods gave way to more and more added sugar, which takes consumption well past recommended levels, is the single strongest message in the movie. This sugar story also showcases how the collective food industry is singularly focused on the financial bottom line, not health and nourishment. One example after another, Fed Up displays how low the food industry will stoop to get their way and the vehicles they use – from straight forward marketing (the words, colors, glitz, endorsements, product placements), to research (leveraging the truth and funding their own research studies), to lobbying (working the government agencies), to collusion and payouts. As a viewer, you will start to understand that the depths of their success can be directly correlated to the growing waistlines and advancing diseases that the American people face.
The movie’s contribution to the ongoing health dialogue is simply to present and condemn the level of conspiracy between the food industry, our elected officials, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. If the best ‘what next’ this movie can offer is to briefly show a family cooking more real food, and to shock you with a 15 year-old going in for elective bariatric surgery (so sad), then it has failed in spite of being able to get you riled up. On the positive side, if you are left with a resolve to never buy processed food again and are now aware of how much sugar is in foods, then that is a great first step. However, knowing what to replace those processed foods with is the necessary missing link. Finally, if you are left only feeling angry, helpless and more overwhelmed, then you are not any better off than before watching the film and might even be worse off.
Post Script
As a person dedicating my days to helping people find health solutions, I was aggravated and agitated almost the entire time I watched the movie. I had a wild desire to pause it – jump up and lead discussions as problems were presented. Taking the audience down the path of doom and gloom, where big-brother has taken over your life and you are left feeling helpless because the “food” stores as you know them are selling you poison, is not helpful. Rather, you and your kids, need to know how to move beyond being fed up. You need to move beyond listening only to what many medical doctors often say, “Eat less and exercise more,” beyond what many nutritionists say, “A calorie is a calorie,” beyond what most diet programs say,” It’s all about portion control.” That is where the new wave of health support and nutrition comes in. Find a health coach that you connect with and has a breadth of success, or a nutritionist that does not have you counting calories and understands the real food groups, not the government sanctioned ones, or a functional medicine doctor who is moving beyond traditional medicine. These are the people who will help you learn, change and stick with it until it becomes your new healthy life.
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