Fed Up Page #4

The byzantine politics

that I saw taking place here

the last couple of weeks had to do

with the power of lobbies.

Despite McGovern's best intention,

the dietary goals were indeed revised

and the words "reduced intake" were

removed from the report for good.

Instead, they encouraged Americans

to buy leaner products

and buy more food with less fat.

And so, the 1980s began

with a new health doctrine,

and a brand-new market,

every food product imaginable

reengineered to be low in fat.

When you take the fat

out of the food, it tastes nasty.

Tastes terrible.

Tastes like cardboard.

Food industry knew that.

So they had to do something

to make the food palatable,

to make it worth eating.

So what did they do?

Dumped in the sugar.

Sugar

Aw, honey, honey

You are my candy girl

And you got me wanting you

Honey

Aw, sugar, sugar

You are my candy girl

And you got me wanting you

Between 1977 and 2000

Americans have doubled

their daily intake of sugar.

Sugar is poison.

It is a chronic... not acute...

chronic dose-dependent...

depends on how much you eat,

because there is a safe threshold,

hepato... "liver"... toxin.

The metabolic diseases that are

associated with obesity,

the diabetes,

the heart disease,

the lipid problems,

the strokes, the cancer...

those diseases

are being driven by sugar.

Fructose,

the sweet part of sugar

can only be processed in the liver.

When your liver is pushed to the max,

the pancreas comes to the rescue

by producing excess amounts

of a hormone called insulin.

Insulin is

the energy storage hormone.

Insulin turns sugar

into fat for storage.

That's insulin's job.

High levels of insulin

can also block your brain

from receiving the signal

that you're full.

Problem is your brain

thinks you're starving.

So how do you feel

when you're starved?

Crappy, tired, slothy.

Sit on the couch,

don't want to do anything.

And, of course, hungry.

Well, I've just described

every obese patient.

The behaviors that

we associate with obesity...

the eating too much, the exercising too

little... the gluttony and the sloth,

they are the result of the biochemistry,

not the cause.

All right.

I'm at the grocery store with my mom

and so far our buggy's got Cheez-Its,

cookies, pudding...

The problem is sugar

isn't just in cookies and desserts.

If you go to the supermarket,

there are 600,000 food items in America,

and 80% of them have added sugar.

Sugar can hide behind

many names on nutrition labels,

like sucrose, fructose,

glucose, dextrose,

lactose, maltose, invert sugar

and turbinado sugar.

And the most well-known of all,

high-fructose corn syrup.

You'll absorb them

exactly the same.

And so, all of the studies that have

pitted high-fructose corn syrup

against sugar

show no difference between the two.

They're both equally bad.

So, too much sugar,

in any form, is dangerous,

even if the high-fructose

corn syrup is replaced

with any of these

other varieties.

It's not just all of

the excessive sugars

but the processed

starches too,

white bread, white rice,

potato products,

prepared breakfast cereals,

are digested into glucose literally

in an instant in the digestive tract.

You can eat a bowl of corn flakes

with no added sugar

or you could eat a bowl of sugar

with no added corn flakes.

They might taste different,

but below the neck,

they're metabolically

the same thing.

When you consume

sugar naturally,

that is, in fruit,

you're getting the fiber that you need

to mitigate the negative effects.

Am I worried about fruit? No.

But am I worried about fruit juice?

Oh, you bet.

Because when you take the fiber out

you might as well be drinking a Coke.

I drink diet soda all the time

and I want to know if diet soda

is good for you or bad for you.

A lot of people think

that they can just switch

from sugar to artificial sweeteners,

"diet" this, "diet" that,

Splenda, aspartame...

but it triggers hormonal responses

that cause you to produce more insulin.

They make you crave more.

They make you hungry.

You think sugar's on the way.

Your brain's like, "Wait a minute,

I think sugar's coming.

I tasted it."

So, low sugar, low fat, diet foods,

they're dangerous, and they're actually

disease producing as well.

Disease doesn't

happen with one meal,

but it happens with a thousand.

But that's what we have, because

now sugar is with every meal.

Good morning. I am just getting ready

to go to school this morning,

and I just ate cereal.

Sweet on the tip

of my tongue

You taste like

Sunlight

And strawberry bubble gum

I have everything I need

here to make my healthy lunch.

Some peanut butter.

You spike my blood

And you make my heart

beat faster

Own me, you own

And rattle my bones

You turn me over and over

Till I can't control myself

Make me a liar, yeah

One big disaster

You make my heart beat

Faster

'Cause you make

my heart beat

Faster

You make my heart beat

Faster, yeah

So, 10 years

of sugar in the morning,

sugar in the evening,

sugar at suppertime,

you've got this

veritable tsunami

of obesity and metabolic

disease we see today.

My name is Joe Lopez.

I'm 14 years old.

And I'm in ninth grade.

Right now

I'm about nearly 400.

I've tried

a lot of things, but...

none of them really work.

I would lose some weight

and then gain it back.

All of us in my family

have always been heavy... all of us.

I guess it's culture.

You know. It used to be...

Grandma used to say,

"You don't get off of that table until

you eat everything you have on there."

And we kind of thought that

that's the way it's supposed to be.

It's not as easy

to just stop eating,

because I have a huge appetite.

for Twinkies and all that sweet stuff.

Yes, I know, you're gonna say

I'm putting him in harm's way...

by giving him all the food

that he wants and stuff,

but I know he sneaks stuff,

cookies and cakes and all that.

Or he gets stuff at school, or he

gets stuff with his brother, and, uh...

You don't have

no control over it.

I wish I did,

but, uh, you don't.

You don't.

Processed food

is much more powerful

than we ever realized.

For decades, we had the science

to show that drugs of abuse

can hijack the neural circuits

to get us to come back

for more and more.

We now have the science to show

that you can make food

hyper-palatable too

and that gets us to come back

for more and more.

Researchers

at Princeton University

have been studying how rats

change their eating behavior

if they're allowed

to drink sugar water...

In a recent study,

43 cocaine-addicted laboratory rats

were given the choice

of cocaine or sugar water

over a 15-day period.

Forty out of the 43 chose the sugar.

In another study,

rats on a sugar water diet

exhibited telltale signs of addiction,

binging, craving and withdrawal

when the sugar was taken away.

Food addiction is a real thing.

It's not a metaphor.

It's a biological fact.

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