Director Stephanie Soechtig's polemic against food-industry giants (and their lobbyists) aims to be the Inconvenient Truth of nutrition. Broadcast journalist and narrator Katie Couric notes how story after story about America's obesity epidemic and fitness craze seemed to make no difference in ballooning weight statistics. The real scoop: fat, constantly blamed in processed-food ad campaigns, is not the true culprit in a looming health crisis. Rather, sugar, cheese and their euphemistic equivalents ("high-fructose corn syrup") have been insidiously dumped into aggressively marketed foods—including "low fat" and health-food products—with the politically-powerful food manufacturing corporations able to successfully keep percentages off the mandatory ingredients labels. In an ideal world, one speaker says, sugary junk-food items (especially beverage sodas) would have advisory warnings and social stigma attached to them like cigarettes. In irony-laden, rapid-edit style, Fed Up delivers the bad news that rampant diabetes and fat-related health issues will likely soon overtax healthcare. The film also (somewhat manipulatively) follows four pained, chunky children who are unable to shed the pounds no matter what they try (one eventually opts for a gastric bypass operation). Experts interviewed include author Michael Pollan, columnist Mark Bittman, and President Bill Clinton, who regrets that his administration dropped the ball on unhealthy school lunches. Recommended. (C. Cassady)
Fed Up
Anchor Bay, 99 min., PG, DVD: $24.98, Blu-ray: $29.99 Volume 30, Issue 1
Fed Up
Star Ratings
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