By Sasha Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: September 24, 2014
We’ve come to the point where the word “obesity” is often followed by the word “epidemic” in North America — especially in the US, where there are 600,000 food items on the market, and 80 per cent of those products have added sugar. Where studies are emerging that say sugar is as addictive as cocaine. Where a third of Americans will have diabetes by 2050.
Yet we still tell people that being healthy is about willpower, not the nutritional content of the food they’re consuming. Why?
Produced by journalist Katie Couric, Laurie David (An Inconvenient Truth) and directed by Stephanie Soechtig, Fed Up examines 30 years of American health (or lack thereof). It comes after the 2008 documentary Food, Inc. in examining the power of the American food industry and the deliberate manipulation of how we perceive food as consumers. Fed Up, however, focuses on the obesity epidemic in relation to America’s favourite ingredient: sugar.
The parallels between junk food companies today and tobacco companies operating 20 years ago are startling. Sugar companies have fought tooth-and-nail to control sugar’s image. Why does the food pyramid not have fruit and veggies at the bottom? Why do labels not include sugar’s “percent of daily intake,” even though sodium, fat, and carbs are included?
Some of the lies we’ve been told about food and health are uncovered in the film, and it’s pretty scary. Consider your average day of food intake. Even if you don’t have a mocha or a can of pop, you are probably eating over your daily intake of sugar — it’s everywhere. It’s in breads and pastas. It’s in anything packaged or canned or processed. It’s called different names by “health” food companies: sucralose, maltose, brown rice syrup, agave, maltodextrin. But no matter what it’s called, it all goes straight into your bloodstream.
You’ve heard the term “empty calories,” but maybe the term should be more like “detrimental calories.” Here’s Fed Up’s very simplified version of why: Say you eat a slice of white bread, or have a can of Coke. It’s digested and quickly converted to glucose. Your blood sugar levels spike. The pancreas produces insulin, which is the hormone for body fat storage, and the majority of the blood glucose is turned into fat.
Carbs, juices, sodas — all of it just turns into fat in your body. And the problem doesn’t stop there. The sugar is rapidly digested, and your blood glucose level turns to normal — but the insulin level is still very high. Ultimately, insulin resistance caused by high insulin levels in your bloodstream takes away your brain’s ability to be “full.”
So after you eat a plate of spaghetti, your brain will still make you feel and act like a hungry person: lethargic, foggy, hungry, irritable. A veritable couch potato.
Exercise — though important — is a distraction point used by companies. Exercising does not eliminate the damage that that chocolate bar has done. Fed Up looks at Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign. It wasn’t originally an attempt to get kids active; it was an attempt to change people’s understanding of health. But once the junk food industry got their hands on it, it became all about exercise.
The food companies see us as a culture focusing on being healthy. They then manipulate food, taking out the fat and adding the sugar, and sell it to us. Low-fat, non-fat — these words usually mean added sugar. And artificial sweeteners are just as deadly as naturally-derived ones.
Obesity is not about willpower, and it’s not about exercise. It’s about companies slipping sweet stuff into our food, telling us that it’s okay via clever advertising, telling us we’re not being controlled.
Fed Up will make you lose your appetite, and that’s a good thing.
