A few weeks ago, Mike and I were fortunate enough to procure the services house sitter extraordinaire, Sandra Hucher. When we hired Sandra to stay with our three dogs, two cats and tank full of fish for the weekend, we had no idea how lucky we were to be able to get her at all. Sandra’s services are in super high demand and she is already booked up for the travel we are doing for the rest of the year. Sandra literally wrote the book on house sitting. She once had a house sitting gig that last two years!
But I digress. After she’d arrived at our house and we’d given her the complete run down on all of our various pets various diets and schedules, Sandra told us she was really excited to be staying at our house this weekend because there was a documentary she really wanted to see playing at a theater nearby. The film is called Fed Up and it hadn’t even crossed my radar when Sandra mentioned it.
But then Mike heard an interview with Katie Couric about it and I started seeing it pop up on some of the Whole30 blogs I was reading, so last night we decided to check it out.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Fed Up should do for obesity what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. Basically the movie looks at the obesity rates in the U.S. (and to a growing extent, the world) and gets to the bottom of our ever-increasing back sides. The foremost authorities on nutrition, obesity, metabolic disease and food are interviewed and they basically all come to one conclusion: sugar is killing us. By 2030, fully HALF of all Americans will be obese and 1 in 3 will have diabetes. Think about that for a minute. Those numbers are staggering.
I know that all of us hate to think about a world without the occasional cupcake or cookie, but that’s really not what we’re talking about here. It’s the hidden sugars in processed foods and soft drinks that are the culprit. How it got these is a longer story which the film explains, breaking the science down.
I consider myself to be fairly well-informed in matters of food and nutrition but I learned so much that I didn’t know. For example, I’ve always believed that a calorie is a calorie, no matter what form it takes. Not so, according to the experts. I was also unaware of the incredible additive properties of sugar– in a study, 40 cocaine addicted rats were given the choice of cocaine or sugar water. 40 out of 40 of them picked the sugar water every time. Mind boggling, yes?
I’m urging you to go see Fed Up if it’s playing in a theater near you. And consider taking the Fed Up 10 Day Challenge, 10 days of abstaining from sugar. (I’m on my 12 day without sugar and I am only just now starting to get over my cravings!)
If you’ve seen the movie or read about it, I’d love to get your opinion.
