Fed Up

I wish the movie Fed Up could somehow be required viewing for Americans. It's refreshing to see an expose rather than a cover-up, news that's true and helpful rather than politically motivated or crafted to boost numbers. I've compiled and paraphrased the most shocking parts of the movie below, for your convenience.

My life and health dramatically improved when I no stopped thinking of sugary junk food as food, and began to rightly see it as an attractively-packaged, socially sanctioned poison. The form of cocaine that's allowed to be left in piles on the breakroom table at work. Dr. Robert Lustig, University of California professor of Pediatrics, clarifies: "Sugar is a poison. A chronic (not acute), dose-dependent (because it matters how much you have and there is a safe threshold) hepato- (liver) toxin."A chronic, dose-dependent, hepatotoxin. That we give to our children and each other as a reward for good behavior. The cocaine comparison is reasonable, except that it might give sugar too much credit. A Princeton University study tested 43 cocaine-addicted laboratory rats, giving them the choice between cocaine or sugar water over 15 days. 40 of the 43 rats chose the sugar. Turns out sugar is eight times more addictive than cocaine. Simple willpower doesn't go far for most people in curbing that kind of craving, and yet willpower is what we recommend to each other for healthier choices, and what overweight people are sometimes accused of lacking.

80% of the 600,000 food items sold in American supermarkets have added sugar. On nutrition facts labels, sugar doesn't have that "% daily value" next to it. If it did, people might realize that a single can of Coke has 104% of the daily recommended sugar intake for men and 156% of the daily recommended intake for women. I got these stats from Coke's website, kind of. They only provided the grams; I did the math. So if you have one Coke in a day, that means even if you have no other dessert or added sugars of any kind during any meal or snack all day, you'll still be above the "healthy" threshold for sugar, a limit which has already been manipulated to be higher than the World Health Organizations's original findings (more on that in a second). And that's just an obvious one. Added sugar is everywhere, even bread and peanut butter. Yogurt and granola, often perceived as healthy choices, have a ton as well.

In January 2004, the U.S. extorted the WHO to the tune of 406 million dollars to keep them from publishing a document about how truly terrible sugar is for your health. This came about as a direct result of the food industry's money and influence in American politics. They strong-armed the WHO into formally recommending a higher daily amount of sugar than their findings revealed is healthy.

Sugar and high fructose corn syrup have an identical effect on the body. I used to think that HFCS was worse for you, but apparently from the body's perspective they're almost identical. And artificial sweeteners cause hormonal imbalance because their taste makes the body expect sugar and prepare for it, but then it's not delivered.

To burn off the calories in one Coke, a child would have to bike for an hour and fifteen minutes. This is just one reason that "exercise more, eat less," is not a helpful recommendation for weight loss. That's the saddest part of this movie, watching children who wish they were not overweight follow the only advice they've heard (heard from their doctors) and fail miserably. They are fighting a losing battle with all their strength, climbing a ladder that's leaning against the wrong wall.

After the American Academy of Family Physicians partnered with Coca-Cola in return for research money, 20 of the physicians publicly resigned, understanding the total incongruity of the partnership. Think we can trust the "studies" that come out of that environment? Soft drink companies fund a lot of medical research, for obvious and avaricious reasons.

In 2006, 80% of American high schools operated under exclusive contracts with soda companies. As the movie put it, "it's a deal with the devil, and the students are the ones losing out." The newest school eating guidelines, revised under Obama, count french fries or a piece of pizza as a serving of vegetables. How is pizza a vegetable? Something to do with tomato paste. This is a classic example of missing the forest for the trees. It takes a willful suspension of reality to conclude that a slice of pizza is equivalent to a serving of vegetables, and it's sick that greedy adults and the U.S. President are willing to claim this, at great risk to America's children. Is it any surprise there's a massive public health crisis when stuff like this is happening?

Michelle Obama started out her time as a First Lady by starting to crack down on this exact issue: processed foods and the food industry in general. It was bold, it was overdue, and it was set to make a big difference to millions of Americans. Her "Let's Move!" campaign was named to indicate the urgency of the matter. (It wasn't named with exercise in mind). The big food lobby met with her and convinced her to pretend like exercising more is going to help with childhood obesity. Maybe she even believes that, but it's just not true (obviously... the facts haven't supported this), and it's an unethical sleight of hand to get everyone to look the wrong way instead of squarely at the food industry to demand an actual fix. The "Let's Move!" name was neatly twisted to refer to exercise.

It's a culturally-embedded myth (planted by--guess who--food advertisers) that eating fast food is cheaper for families. While no one denies that fast food is, well, faster, I can attest to the fact that there's no way its cheaper. I save up to 80% on food costs by cooking and eating at home. Fed Up shows a comparison of a price for a healthy, grocery-store bought meal for 4 and then a fast food meal for 4. The grocery-bought was about half the price. It may be difficult to eat well in America for many reasons, but price, at least as compared to eating out, is not one of them.

It may take a while for the positive changes to kick in, but someday we may treat sugar, soda, and highly processed foods the way we currently treat tobacco... not illegal, but not allowed to be marketed to kids by celebrities, not found at kids' eye level in every single checkout lane no matter the store, and certainly not sold and served to kids at school via an exclusive contract. If these changes and others like them take place, we stand to save billions or trillions of dollars on health care, a numerical indicator of the vastly improved lives many Americans would lead.

The Zootopian Agenda

Zootopia was fun and funny and entertaining. I recommend it, with a caution that there are some parts that would be super scary for little kids (like, scarier than Ursula getting huge in The Little Mermaid; about on par with that Jekyll and Hyde thing in The Pagemaster--not quite that bad but getting there).

Having said all that, I have to comment on its agenda. The film had a very clear one: that biology is immaterial (excuse the pun) when it comes to living the life you want and achieving your dreams. Spoiler alert: they had a rookie 2-pound bunny consistently outperform experienced 2,000-14,000-pound animals like rhinos, elephants, and cape buffalo in the field of law enforcement. While it is of course not impossible that a bunny could do that, the movie goes beyond "it happened one time and it was special" to emphasizing that it should be this way for all at all times, and biology is nothing but an old-fashioned state of mind that, if abolished, would usher in utopia. Wait, like, what? Do these moviemakers inhabit the physical world like the rest of us?

Because it was a movie, they were able to carefully craft the narrative such that the bunny's job never required her to do something she physically couldn't do; her brain won every battle for her. For instance, she hops off the backs of her classmates in police school to scale a wall she couldn't otherwise have any hope of surmounting. This impresses everyone (the teacher) rather than makes them ask, "What if the test had required her to climb the wall alone? Do ten police officers usually handle the same situation at the same time?"

I accept that movies are often unrealistic. It's damn hard to craft a believable story in a compressed space. Real life is way more boring, so you have to skip lots of parts in a story, which can make it seem "too easy." You have to partially shave off the inconvenient bits of reality to make your point. But this movie's flouting of reality is vast and noteworthy.

Judy the bunny had a lot to offer the police squad, but that doesn't mean that she was equal in every way to all the stronger animals, with no differences, as the movie implied. We all have different strengths and weaknesses (yes, often based on biology), so working as a team we can achieve a lot more. In this case, the police force needed brute strength as well as passion and smarts.

Biology is a real thing. It matters, sometimes on a small scale and sometimes on a large one. It's wonderful to tell children to pursue their dreams, even if they seem far-fetched. But rising above one's circumstances or biology is different than denying or ignoring one's circumstances/biology. Zootopia does the latter, and that's why I'm concerned.

A tragic example of what happens when we tell children they can be and do whatever they want unconditionally, no questions asked, is the story of Jessica Dubroff. She's the 7-year-old whose parents never taught her the word "no." She had 35 hours of flight training when, upon the suggestion of her father, she decided to become the youngest person to fly across the North American continent. Great emphasis was placed by both her parents on the fact that she chose this for herself. Here's a mention of her biology from Time Magazine: the "Federal Aviation Administration... permitted a 4-ft. 2-in., 55-lb. seven-year-old whose feet did not reach the rudder pedals to fly an airplane across the country." Tragically, Jessica didn't reach her goal. She died in a crash that also claimed the lives of her father and her flight instructor. Famously, her mother said she had no regrets, emphasizing her daughter's freedom of choice as an American. Time's take: "Many wondered whether the freedom to pursue personal identity had been pushed too far."

Asserting that biology is a real thing feels oddly risky in our day and age. Then again, maybe it felt that way in 1996 as well (the year of Jessica's flight) and I was not old enough to know it. It reminds me of the Emperor's New Clothes story. It involves a lot of group pretending to arrive at and stay at the conclusion that the physical world doesn't matter, is nothing but an inconvenience on the road to human self-realization. As it relates to Jessica: "The hype of the whole enterprise, in retrospect, seems reckless. Let us tick off the deceptions that everyone involved pretended were true: the trip was Jessica's idea; she was doing it for the joy of flying; she was truly piloting the plane; it was safe; she wasn't scared. For the most part, the public played along with this game, for it is easier not to question the received platitudes." I won't go into the full list of topics these sentences could apply to. I'll simply say that ideologies like the one blatantly promoted in Zootopia push us to pretend certain things are true. It's still easier (and more politically correct) not to question them. May we as adults encourage the children in our lives to participate in reality as it is, even when our aim is to rise above where it finds us now. Even if that means a conversation on the way home from Zootopia.