“Fed Up” is an effective new documentary from director Stephanie Soechtig and executive producer Katie Couric that is long overdue. With a clear purpose to do for the health crisis what “An Inconvenient Truth” did for global warming, this film offers a critical look at our nation’s eating habits, but believes that the problem may not be entirely our fault.
Considering how diet-obsessed North America is, it seems baffling that our population’s obesity levels continue to rise at disturbing rates. While conventional wisdom states that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, “Fed Up” argues that these efforts to fight the epidemic have been misplaced, and that it’s not how much we eat, but what we’re eating that’s doing damage to our health.
The fault lies directly with the food industry’s peddling of foods with unhealthy additives. Companies have answered the increasing demand for less fat, low calorie food options by pumping up the sugar content to add flavor, making products that are equally as unhealthy and highly addictive to boot.
The documentary illustrates the similar strategies used by Big Tobacco and those the food industry employs, specifically the aggressive marketing of their products to children, brainwashing us from an early age to crave, say, a Happy Meal. The problem is a systemic one, caused by the deep pockets of the food industry, which gain it the ability to lobby and prevent governmental regulation.
Soechtig’s film suggests that, as the public has done with the tobacco companies, the solution is outright condemnation of the industry’s tactics and a massive grassroots outcry rallying around the need for strict regulations.
In its delivery, “Fed Up” has a tendency to oversimplify things for the sake of its argument, at a certain point seemingly making the claim that exercise won’t really do you any good. Despite the obvious flaws, it’s not hard to get behind the film’s ultimate goal of making healthy eating as much of a habit and as easy for the average person as picking up a burger and fries at the drive-through.
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