You are what you eat. That is the simple message from Stephanie Soechting’s new documentary
about the food we produce / consume and the correlation with the ‘global
obesity epidemic’ that we have been hearing for the last few decades. Fed Up
explores two parallel ideas: that the amount of sugar we ingest is more
important than the levels of fat or calories (or even exercise); and that
multinational food companies and corporate lobbyists have spent decades feeding
us misinformation about how to live healthy lives and exploiting our ignorance
for vast profits.
The film divides itself between the
emotional personal journeys of a number of obese youngsters trying to lose
weight, and more factual sections of historical and political analysis of the
processed food industry and how it has gained such dominance in American
culture. At certain points, watching Fed
Up is worse than sitting through a horror film. Horror films work by confronting characters
with symbolic external threats (vampire; disaster; psychotic killers etc.), which
make audiences empathise and reflect on their own axietites. Fed Up
makes you reflect about the long-term internal threat that audiences are doing
to their own bodies by eating such dangerous levels of sugar. The sugar in my tea suddenly felt obscene and
frightening….
The documentary sets the tone with a
classic media moral-panic montage from the familiar faces on Fox News, CNN,
MNSBC, ABC and the rest – so already the stage is set for an attack on the
insane rhetoric that emanates from the American broadcast news and clouds the
public discourse. These shows are an
easy target and Soechting could be accused of selective editing to make them
seem more ridiculous, yet if you watch TV broadcast news (or read British
Newspapers) for any period of time then you will know that this is exactly what
they’re like: loud, contradictory pro-business and mostly anti-science.
Everyone knows that statistics are easy
to manipulate, and are often just confusing, but some of the numbers in the
film are hard to ignore: in 30 years the number of cases of type 2 diabetes in
young people has risen to 57,000 from the previous figure of 0; 80% of the
600,000 products in an average supermarket contain added sugar; children as
young as 8 years old are now having strokes and heart attacks due to junk food.
Yet beyond the facts and figures, some
of the most insidious information is just plain fact: health insurances
companies buy stocks in fast food companies in order to make profits from
unhealthy customers; the U.S. congress were lobbied to reclassify pizza and
fries as “vegetables” in order to keep them on high-school menus; Pepsi
spokespeople make statements under oath claiming that there is no link between
soda products and health problems… these are the truly shocking moments in the
film and are fairly indefensible.
At times, the use of terrified obese
children crying in to the camera can feel uncomfortably exploitative, but then
without the human stories then the film could have just been too abstract with
discussions of select committees and molecular biology.
The film ends with a simple
healthy-eating manifesto that tries to promote simple rules, such as: don’t eat
food that doesn’t look like it came from nature; or don’t eat food that
contains ingredients that you don’t recognize – both much easier said than
done. Fed Up is the sort of film that should be projected onto the side
of every KFC and go viral across every social network. Whilst politicians across the world discuss national
deficits, defence budgets and voting reform their populations are killing
themselves due to the corrosive influence of junk food companies, and as is
stated clearly within the film – and army of unhealthy children will grow up to
leave a huge shortfall of soldiers, fireman and police and cost the countries
billions in extra healthcare.
We need to all admit we are Fed Up and
try and change the imbalance of power with these companies and feel better
about who we are and what we eat.
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