Just who's to blame for the childhood obesity epidemic? Over the years, the finger has been pointed at parents, video games, Happy Meals and the hamburgers in the school cafeteria.
A new documentary, Fed Up, alleges it all boils down to simple substance most of us consume every day: sugar. The pushers of "the new tobacco," according to the film, are the food industry and our own government.
With a mix of dramatic music, scary soundbites and powerful images of kids injecting insulin into their chubby tummies, Fed Up argues the children are not to blame. For the rising number of overweight and obese kids, the mantra of "eat less, move more" is an impossible goal. They simply can't circumvent the onslaught of marketing that has made them into junk-food junkies, the film says.
"What if our whole approach to this epidemic has been dead wrong?" the film's narrator, TV journalist Katie Couric, says in the film's opening.
Hoping to do for childhood obesity what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change, Fed Up takes on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign and Big Food: Coca Cola, Nestle, Kraft, and Kellogg, to name a few. Laurie David, who produced the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, is executive producer along with Couric; Stephanie Soechtig is the director.
The film sometimes resorts to hyperbole to describe the obesity epidemic and its related health costs, but the message is backed up with sobering statistics and policies that got us here.
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