MAGGIE VALENTINE, a 12-year-old in Oklahoma City, swims four days a week. She hops int o the pool cheerfully and uses the butterfly stroke to propel herself forward. Despite exercising, as well as attempting to diet, she weighs 212lb. In a new documentary, “Fed Up”, Maggie is occasionally overwhelmed, tears trickling down her cheeks: “My weight is not really going the way it’s supposed to go.”
America’s obesity problem is hardly news. Indeed there are some hints that, among certain groups, it might be abating. But more than one in three American adults and one in six children are fat. Who is to blame? “Fed Up” is directed by Stephanie Soechtig and produced by Katie Couric, a prominent American newscaster, and Laurie David, who made “An Inconvenient Truth”. That film helped to popularise the fight against climate change. Ms David and Ms Couric hope to do the same for fighting flab.
Obesity is a global problem (as “Fed Up” mentions in passing). But on its surface it would seem the most personal of failures: an individual eats too much and exercises too little. This ignores the work of behavioural economists and biologists. Humans have evolved over millennia to ensure that weight is hard to lose. It is too simplistic to blame obesity merely on lack of willpower. That would let both food companies and politicians off the hook.
“Fed Up” is determined to hold them to account. Food companies are keen for children to eat their junk foods, which are available not just in shops but in schools. America’s politicians, “Fed Up” argues, are complicit. Notoriously, America’s school-lunch law counts the tomato paste on pizza as a vegetable.
This film lambasts many, from Coca-Cola to a less obvious target, Michelle Obama, for waging too feeble a war against food companies. However, the main foe in “Fed Up” is sugar. Food companies have pumped sugar into bread and peanut butter, as