Hacker Cinema
Fat Head
2009 · Film · documentary · 104 min
Directed by Tom Naughton
A comedian replies to the "Super Size Me" crowd by losing weight on a fast-food diet while demonstrating that almost everything you think you know about the obesity "epidemic" and healthy eating is wrong.
5 positive2 mixed2 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
I prefer the movie Fat Head where the guy loses weight by only eating mcdonald (and walking i think?).
"Every doctor" would be wrong. The guy from the Fat Head documentary showed that you can lose weight and become healthier on an all-McDonalds diet.
Also, the food pyramid (which, admittedly, is so incorrect that it should cause you to question any healthcare professional who quotes it) does include a small layer for fat, oil, sugar, and sweets, implying you can have them as an occasional treat but not all the time. No doctor is going to tell you to never eat at McDonalds, only to make it a rare treat.
Then watch the Fat Head documentary and be confused once again.
The "Fat Head" movie is good response to the "Super Size Me". It proves that eating at McDonald's isn't as bad as one might think and it also presents a lot of other interesting stuff.
Check out Fat Head. A Documentary response to Super Size Me that discusses how what we "know" about fat and cholesterol was the result of a politician lining his pockets by pushing the agenda of one of his friends in the business world http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fat_Head/70115017?trkid=2361637
Fat Head has some excellent content, but it is far from a superb documentary.
The professor specifically meant the statistical inference, e.g. that accounting for all other factors that some factor X1 (in this case sugar) is Y times more correlated with Z observation (diabetes) than X2 (total calories).
The main issue I would have would this video is the excessive focus on sugar the product and its direct sweetness associates rather than blood sugar levels which is far more directly relevant to diabetes and obesity in general. For example, common wheat bread and many sodas have a higher glycemic index than granulated table sugar! Therefore, they are converted into higher levels of blood sugar while at the same time being incredibly easy to over-consume (compared to trying to eat sugar directly).
There is an excellent documentary created three years ago which explained in simple terms a huge amount to laymen about current scientific understanding and the unbelievable lengths to which industry and governments have gone to "encourage" a specific type of modern agriculture and associated food industry regardless of its health effects or consistent scientific evidence, especially in the US. It also covers why the Lipid Hypothesis is completely unvalidated, if not provably wrong.
It is called "Fat Head (2009)" and it was available in full on Youtube until copyright notices removed it. It starts a little slowly and actually begins with a deep criticism of the logical fallacies in "Supersize Me" the movie, uses at one point slightly silly comic imagery, but by the second half there is excellent up-to-date food science and historical explanation as to why society is at is now. I am very grateful to another HN user that referred it to me about a year go.
Anther superb and complementary programme was a Feb 2009 BBC Horizon episode called "Why Are Thin People Not Fat?" which is available on iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hbsk2). It is almost two programmes side-by-side. One sub-programme is a loose experiment to attempt to make a random group of young adults fat and why in some cases it effectively failed. The other sub-programme covers the summary results and science behind a deep, long and published study of a large number of obese people at a specialist clinic which profoundly contributed to scientific understanding of how obesity develops and what makes it so difficult to reverse beyond a certain point.
I highly recommend both programmes. They will change they way you think, even if you have absolutely no interest in changing your food or lifestyle, and in some cases are surprisingly uncommon "common sense". But the kind of common sense only your grandparents and all those who were born before the 1970s would implicitly understand.
For those who have not seen it, I highly recommend the documentary "Fat Head (2009)". It covers a wide variety of these issues in great detail but in very entertaining way!
Here's a Youtube link to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVEiYwFvKvU
How old are you? In your 30s your body most likely will change, significantly.
Besides everything else, you are good to get periodontal disease and have false teeth early on. Nutrition is clear on several aspects. Eating horrible food is not some perceptual mystery. Eventually it will catch up to you. And it often makes you feel bad instantly.
Try changing your diet for 30-days, eat more fruits, vegetables, cut your sugar intake etc and see if you feel different.
And have you seen Tom Naughton's film Fat Head (the anti-Super Size Me doc)? Some bad logic in it but you sound like you could appreciate it. Good luck.
Food and Health:
Fat Head (2009) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333994/ Especially if you've seen "Super Size Me", but even if you haven't, an amusing yet educational take on the obesity "epidemic".
Food, Inc. (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/ - Exposing the absurdity of our industrial food economy.
Music and Entertainment:
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1157605/ Talk about never giving up on your dreams.
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387412/ The other side of fame.
Everyone who reads an article in the press about health and nutrition should be required to watch this video, Science for Smart People -- a presentation by Tom Naughton, who wrote and directed the movie "Fat Head". It is a brilliant deconstruction of bad science and the bad journalists that report the bad science, in the context of health and nutrition.
One of many points he makes is the ridiculousness of reporting on miraculous health claims that have only been shown to work on rodents.
The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RXvBveht0
And, I just submitted it to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2635326