The new documentary "Fed Up" reveals how Big Food pushed
the government to give out compromised health
information.
May 28, 2014 |
The documentary Fed Up, released in theaters
on May 9, untangles 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 the government’s decades-long
capitulation to Big Food and its lobbyists has fostered
an epidemic of excess pounds. The national focus on
diet, diet foods and exercise is not abating the obesity
epidemic and actually making it worse, charges
the film.
Examples of capitulation to Big Food are many in the
film. In 1977, the McGovern Report warned about an
impending obesity epidemic and suggested revised USDA
guidelines to recommend people eat less foods high in
fat and sugar. The egg, sugar and other Big Food
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 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 US would withdraw its WHO financial support.
Again, Big Food won.
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 farmers.
According to Fed Up, the low fat movement
allowed the USDA to maximize those split loyalties.
First, in order to maintain taste in low-fat foods
(which tend to be bland once the fat is removed),
sugar became the evil stand-in. Much of Fed Up
examines the role of excess sugar in obesity, metabolic
disorder and food addiction, especially in soft drinks.
(The film's exposure of Big Food's financially-driven
infiltration of public school lunchrooms with junk food
is astonishing.) 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 and 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, Bill Clinton
and award-winning reporter Duff Wilson who uncovered
high-level
conflicts of interest in the food and beverage
industry. Fed Up 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), bad school
environments and, primarily, a government that has caved
to Big Food. The government practiced similar complicity
with Big Tobacco, Fed Up accurately points out,
until the death statistics could not be ignored anymore.
It is too bad that Fed Up ignored what many
believe is a bigger reason for American obesity than
sugar: Big Meat's use of growth enhancers like
antibiotics, hormones,
ractopamine and even arsenic. It certainly makes
sense that chemicals and hormones that balloon livestock
into
huge carcasses with no increase in the amount of
their feed would have the same effect on people who eat
the meat. But only recently has the
role of antibiotics in childhood obesity been
examined, notably by Martin Blaser of New York
University
Langone Medical Center. Eighty percent of U.S.
antibiotics go to livestock and residues are regularly
found in U.S. meat.
http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/unexpected-reason-americans-are-overweight?