Fat Head Movie Review

The film contains a decent introduction to the emerging science championed by Taubes and others about the mechanisms of fats, carbs, and sugars in connection with weight gain and coronary disease. But the presentation includes exactly nobody to defend the conventional medical wisdom, and is consistently dragged down by Naughton’s gratuitous anti-government libertarian political views, even including an editor at “Reason” magazine alongside the doctors and research scientists who discuss the science.

Naughton goes so far as to argue that people living in poverty have higher rates of obesity due to a supposed genetic predispoition of non-whites toward “thicker bodies” and he links higher weight among the young to court-order school busing to achieve desegregation. His attempts at humor are consistently juvenile (questioning people on the street if eating fettucine alfredo caused them to suffer a heart attack immediately thereafter) and his rambling attack on “Supersize Me” is mostly incoherent and an unnecessary distraction to the argument about the role of saturated fat vs. carbs and sugars.

I do share the conclusion that conventional medical understanding on saturated fat and cholesterol is wrong (or at least flawed and incomplete), and I had hoped Fat Head would provide a clean and sharp presentation of the alternative view. Unfortunately the film wastes so much time “debunking” Spurlock, defending the fast food industry, and obsessing over a conspiracy theory involving a coalition of “radical” vegetarians, “big government,” and the medical and scientific community, that the Fat Head may well alienate as many viewers as it persuades.

Very good points.

I would add that in science, as in other aspects of life, sometimes conventional wisdom forms around a consensus about a theory too quickly, for reasons that are innocent rather than sinister. One of the things that bothers me about the film is the knee-jerk depiction of everything as a vast conspiracy by vested interests in the medical and scientific establisments, big governments, and (most laughably) vegetarians, as supposedly knowingly trying to push false information for the benefit of this peculiar coalition of interests.

A prime example is the way the film portrays Ancel Keys. He is mocked with funny face cartoons, and portrayed as a complete fraud out to make a name for himself by cooking the books in his research on the effects of saturated fat. Keys may certainly have reached the wrong conclusion, but if there is blame to be applied, it would better apply to the rest of the scientific and medical community to form a consensus too quickly, without further rigorous testing of Keys’ conclusions. If you research the life and career of Ancel Keys, you will discover he was an extremely interesting guy, a great scientist and a prolific author, who lived to past the age of 100, and who was certainly no vegetarian (though he tended to favor a Mediterranean style diet). He does not deserve the sort of demonization that he receives from Naughton, simply because he found statistical support for the idea that there appeared to be some correlation between higher incidence of coronary disease and higher intake of saturated fats.

The consensus that formed around saturated fats was premature and is now in the process of change. We should educate people about this change in thinking, and recalibrate our public policy to better reflect emerging scientific understanding. My impression is that while we may now better appreciate that saturated fats are less of a problem than was previously understood, and that substituting carbs and sugars in our foods for saturated fats has been a poor trade-off, it is also true that today it is still premature to pretend that we have a perfect understanding of all of the metabolic processes involved.

Even Gary Taubes, perhaps the most influential and prominent writer on the new understanding, always takes pains to underscore that further studies are needed to fully answer a myriad of questions about the mechanisms by which dietary habits impact obesity, pre-diabetic syndromes, and coronary disease. Naughton’s confused, overly-judgmental, and overly simplistic finger-pointing approach is at least as bad as the old dogmas that he attacks in his film.

Good comments.

While both Spurlock’s and Naughton’s fast food experiments produce exactly the outcomes one would expect, for me Naughton is “Captain Double Obvious” because he thinks that somehow his result is a rebuttal to Spurlock’s, when in fact their eating strategies were exactly the opposite of each other. To me, that makes Naughton’s film the dumber of the two.

I agree that his disdain for vegetarians also got in the way of his arguments. I am also not a vegetarian, but I know a few who are very athletic, and I think anyone on a vegetarian diet who is feeling weak is not balancing that diet correctly.

Anyway…I totally agree with you.

Busing kids to school is not directly linked with desegregation. Desegregation busing is another topic but in general it was prevalent in ubran areas many decades ago. I am from PA and they don’t do it in Philly anymore. In addition, I walked to school in a small town but today kids have to bused because they don’t think they can look across the street before crossing or are worried about child molesters. It doesn’t appear that he grew up in urban area either so his reference to walking to school has nothing to do with segregation.

I’m a pretty big fan of this documentary so I may be a bit biased, but I do think he was trying to get at the point that we aren’t as active, from even the early stages of our youth, compared to the past.