Fed Up

Film (2013)

Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge, MA

If you have seen the documentary Food Inc.(2008), you get the general gist of this film, which is closely related in spirit. Whereas Food Inc. features some material about fast food and its effects on rapidly growing obesity rates in its general indictment of the corporate food industry, Fed Up is almost entirely focused on that.

In addition to offering an abundance of interesting details about the food industry, it profiles several children, all of whom are endearing and all of whom are obese. Their stories are touching and often difficult to hear. They all know they are fat, they all want to lose the weight, and they all express a great deal of frustration about how difficult it is to do so.

The main argument of the film is that sugar permeates the junk-food industry, in recent years does so in higher and higher concentrations, and that this dominance of sugar in popular processed foods is the fundamental cause of widespread obesity. Though the film acknowledges that other food components, like fats, do contribute to the problem, they are not the crux of it. Additionally, the sugar industry has become so powerful, according to this argument, combatting the widespread perpetration of sugary foods upon a relatively unknowing public is an uphill battle.

The greatest help, according to the film, would be to educate the public about the dangers of consuming such vast quantities of sugar, but it acknowledges the difficulty of doing that effectively with such a powerful industrial lobby at stake.

We watch school lunchrooms passing out enormous portions of nutritionless foods to children and and see how frequently schools adopt soda companies as sponsors, and agree, in return, to display their advertisements. One easily sees how difficult it is for kids to steer clear of the influence of the industry that wants to take over their eating habits; it is truly awful to witness.

Though the spirit of the film is noble and its wide-ranging collection of information often fascinating, the argument of the film tends to wander a bit more than it might.

When, for example, it begins to describe the unique role of sugar in creating haphazard metabolic patterns by calling out insulin to an intensely unhealthy degree, it shifts, without much explanation, to the realm of diet sodas and tries to argue that they too are metabolically unhealthy. The argument is important and suggestive but too brief, indicating that the mere taste of excessive sweetness calls out an insulin response which induces subsequent unnatural hunger. This is the kind of soft argumentation that the film relies too heavily upon in a number of instances.

There is the suggestion that First Lady Michelle Obama, despite her best intentions to address the plague of childhood obesity by encouraging exercise, perhaps inadvertently but somewhat politically conveniently, steers clear of conflict with the powerful sugar lobby by doing so. According to the film, no one can argue about the benefits of exercise, a politically neutral position. Taking on the enormous sugar lobby, however, would be far more risky politically. Again, this is a good point, but it is made much too indirectly, without enough substantiation.

The film additionally raises a truly interesting and probably very little known fact about obesity. Apparently, even seemingly thin people can have unhealthy amounts of fat hidden internally. A scan done on several outwardly thin children reveals that some of them harbor significant amounts of this internal fat. This observation enhances the shock value of the already shocking statistics about childhood obesity which are based solely on assessments of overt body fat. The conclusion is that a far greater percentage of the population suffers from sugar sickness than one might have thought.

This is indeed a polemical documentary, one that argues a particular point, is overtly slanted rather than unbiased and intended to make a strong case.

Inside Job (2010), Charles Ferguson’s brilliant account of the causes of the 2008 financial collapse, was a paradigmatic example of this sort of documentary. It raised plenty of questions and answered them compellingly. One walked away from the film feeling that it had delivered a forceful and tightly constructed cinematic exposition of its arguments.

Fed Up is well-meaning, earnest, and an important addition to a growing series of documentaries about the negative effects of much of the food industry on public health, but it does not spend enough time gathering its arguments to make them as compelling as they might be. One walks away with a grave sense of the problem and a partial sense of its causes.

There is much to be learned from this film, but its message is so important that other treatments should follow closely upon it with more carefully argued points about sugar as the central culprit, about the metabolic effects of artificial sweeteners, and about the political influence of the sugar and fast food lobby on programs to direct attention away from their own culpability.

One would hope for documentary sequels with the analytically polemical power of Inside Job to make it impossible not to assimilate how significantly corporate power in much of the food industry has corrupted, very literally, the insides of our body-politic.

– BADMan

One of the kids