CHICAGO—Released in theaters on May 9, the documentary “Fed Up” starts to untangle the roots of obesity in America’s youth.
Directed by Stephanie Soechtig and narrated by Katie Couric, “Fed Up” does not shrink from telling viewers how sugar and the government’s decades-long capitulation to Big Food and its lobbyists has fostered an epidemic of excess pounds.
Much of “Fed Up” examines the role of excess sugar in obesity, metabolic disorder, and food addiction, especially in soft drinks.
The film chronicles the struggle of obese children who have become addicted to food through unethical advertising, snack ubiquity, enabling parents (who also look overweight in the film), and bad school environments—but primarily a government that has caved in to Big Food.
The film’s exposure of Big Food’s financially driven infiltration of public school lunchrooms with junk food is astonishing. The government practiced similar complicity with Big Tobacco, “Fed Up” accurately points out, until the death statistics could not be ignored anymore.
One of the many examples of capitulation in the film is the government’s disregard of the McGovern Report in 1977. The report warned of an impending obesity epidemic and suggested the USDA revise guidelines to recommend people eat less of foods high in fat and sugar.
Big Food industries, including the egg and sugar industries, seeing a risk to profits, demanded that guidelines not say “eat less” of the offending foods, but rather “eat more low-fat” foods. Ka-ching! They won over the objection of Sen. McGovern.
In 2006, the United Nation’s World Health Organization (WHO) released similar food recommendations, and the then-Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy G. Thompson actually flew to Geneva, according to “Fed Up,” to threaten WHO that if the guidelines stood, the United States would withdraw its WHO financial support. Again, Big Food won.
The film also points out how the U.S. government plays both sides of the obesity street—admonishing people to eat right while pushing the foods that make them fat—because of the USDA’s double mission of protecting the nation’s health and protecting the health of the nation’s agricultural industry. According to “Fed Up,” the low-fat movement allowed the USDA to maximize those split loyalties.
In order to maintain taste in low-fat foods, sugar became the evil stand-in, but the low-fat craze had another pernicious effect. All that unused fat had to go somewhere, says “Fed Up,” and it ended up in the dairy industry’s cheese operations.
Even as the USDA recommended low-fat diets, it worked with the industry group Dairy Management to “cheesify” the American diet. It even worked with Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Domino’s.
Appearing in “Fed Up” are food experts Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Deborah Cohen (author of “A Big Fat Crisis”), former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, former President Bill Clinton, and award-winning reporter Duff Wilson, who uncovered high-level conflicts of interest in the food and beverage industry.
While the film offers great insight into the connection between sugar and obesity, it does not address what many believe is a bigger reason for American obesity: Big Meat’s use of growth enhancers like antibiotics, hormones, ractopamine, and even arsenic.
It certainly makes sense that these chemicals and hormones, which balloon livestock into huge carcasses with no increase in the amount of food they eat, would have the same effect on people who eat their meat.
But the role of antibiotics in childhood obesity has only recently been examined, notably by Martin Blaser of New York University’s Langone Medical Center. Eighty percent of U.S. antibiotics go to livestock, and residues are regularly found in U.S. meat.
While America’s affair with sugar and soft drinks is decades old, it is only since 1997 that Big Ag started treating meat with the asthma-like drug ractopamine, largely unnoticed by consumers, to produce weight gain in animals. It was also in the late 1990s that extreme obesity and heightened asthma rates (sometimes linked to hormones) surfaced in children.
Ractopamine, antibiotics, the beef hormones oestradiol-17, zeranol, trenbolone acetate and melengestrol acetate, and arsenic (used by U.S. poultry producers for weight gain) are all prohibited in most of the EU. Europe also has much lower obesity rates than the industry-pleasing United States as “Fed Up” so well describes.
Martha Rosenberg is author of the award-cited food expose “Born with a Junk Food Deficiency,” distributed by Random House. A nationally known muckraker, she has lectured at the university and medical school level and appeared on radio and television.
FILM REVIEW
“Fed Up”
Director: Stephanie Soechtig
Documentary
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
Release Date: May 9
Not Rated
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