Documentaries like Fed Up — and Chasing Ice, An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc.; Addiction Incorporated, Collapse, The Corporation, Countdown to Zero, The Cove, Fuel, I.O.U.S.A., How to Make Money Selling Drugs, Greedy Lying Bastards, etc. — scare the shit out of us. That’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s why we call them Outrage Docs. Everything we’ve been taught is wrong. I’m never going to: smoke a cigarette, drive a fossil-fuel-powered car, go to a marine animal theme park, eat junk food, use a plastic bag, vote for a corporate-whore pol, ingest Oxycontin, or borrow money unnecessarily again. I swear it. Never again.
But sometimes we slip up and forget all the warnings we’ve heard. There are so many things to worry about. That’s where Stephanie Soechtig’s Fed Up comes in handy. Its message drives into us with the speed and precision of a cranial saw: Sugar is deadly. It will give you diabetes. It is responsible for the worldwide obesity epidemic. It has been compared to “a domestic terrorist plot.” Sugar is produced, packaged, marketed, and sold with evil cunning. And you probably eat it every day. Even in North Berkeley.
Don’t take our word for it. Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, former US Senator Tom Harkin, Bill Clinton, Mark Hyman, pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, public health advocate Michele Simon, and Katie Couric (who co-produced) all tell us so. And so do, in their way, the obese kids who sob onscreen because they can’t seem to get better no matter what they do. So Fed Up hits us hard. You might want to take the “Fed Up Challenge” (stay off sugar for ten days, cook real food, etc.) at FedUpMovie.com. You might also want to see the movie.
