Fed Up: A Wake-Up Call

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Fed Up is the film the food industry doesn’t want you to see. 

In an insightful documentary debut, executive producer and narrator Katie Couric joins forces with Laurie David (An Inconvenient Truth), Regina Scully (The Invisible War), and Stephanie Soechtig (Tapped) as they tackle the topic of a spreading epidemic among children – obesity. With many documentaries that critique the American diet having come out in recent years, this one hits close to home, as Texas ranks sixth among all US states when it comes to childhood obesity rates.

Sugar is the Enemy

Since the 1980s, we’ve been told by scientists that exercise is the most common sense answer to getting rid of unwanted weight. Their solution to fighting obesity is to “energy balance” – to match calories in with calories out. However today, a couple of decades later, two out of three Americans are still overweight or obese.

This thought-provoking documentary focuses on how the amount of sugar (how long does sugar last?) in food has contributed to the obesity epidemic in kids. Fed Up harshly chronicles a culture wherein sugar is embedded into all of our everyday food products. The film intends to make viewers aware of the fact that sugar is always in almost everything we eat, regardless of whether the product is labeled “low calorie” or “low fat”.

Over three years, the filmmakers document the lives of children who have fallen victim to the flawed values of our national food system. Armed with great discussion points, the film presents interviews with several obese adolescents and their families, all struggling to deal with unwanted weight. The interviews make it alarmingly clear that exercise is far from the cure-all, proving that we cannot simply exercise our way out of obesity. The real culprit, Fed Up argues, is an industry pushing sugar-laden food on unsuspecting families. Ultimately, the problem is how the US food industry deals with sugar, allowing this public menace to harm children and threaten their lives.

Summary

Change, according to the film, isn’t going to happen unless it comes in the form of a revolution. Fed Up isn’t just a warning to food consumers, it’s a rallying cry for help. In the past 30 to 40 years, we’ve doubled our sugar intake, seen an epidemic of Type II diabetes, and watched overweight kids ascend from the exception to the norm – thanks to sugary food. Let’s prevent disease before it begins. Education around nutrition needs to start early. Because unless you’re clued up, clever marketing wins every time. 

Fed Up is not a sermon, it’s a wake-up call.