With books, thank God, we tend to treat the facts with more respect.
#My sugar story movie
Instead the critics called the movie “ reminiscent of The Insider, the whistleblowing thriller about Big Tobacco” ( New York Daily News) and its message “ clear, shrewdly edited and peculiarly interesting” ( New York Times). But you wouldn’t find this information in any film review. The best-available evidence suggests that amygdalin doesn’t work, and that it may in fact be dangerous.
I saw the same thing happen with last year’s documentary Second Opinion, about an alleged conspiracy to deprive Americans of the natural, cancer-curing chemical amygdalin (also called vitamin B17). (A few noted that the movie sounded like an infomercial, but these were gripes about its form more than its content.) “ now-healthy heart is in the right place,” wrote one reviewer in the New York Times, as if to sidestep any judgment from his brain. Yet the critics never grappled with the movie’s science. Joel Fuhrman, a nutrition guru who promotes vacuous but impressive-sounding “ health equations” as a means of bettering one’s life. That documentary shows him under the medical care of Dr. In 2011, another Australian, Joe Cross, put out the documentary Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, about a 60-day green-juice fast that helped him trim 90 pounds and wean off medication for his autoimmune disease. How entertaining is the film, and how persuasive? These are measures of a movie’s craft, not of its truth.Īs a result, simple-minded and suspicious notions run rampant through the movie pages of the newspaper. Instead they treat propaganda as a form of self-expression, rated for its rhetoric. Yet movie critics never seem to broaden out their brief. Isn’t it the job of these reviewers to appraise the message of a scientific film in scientific terms? Why can’t they try to test its claims against the facts? That Sugar Film, like other “issues-oriented” docs, would seem to merit something other than a standard film review-one based on expertise rather than aesthetics. But That Sugar Film is so highly processed, and so laden with chintzy, artificial arguments, that its many weaknesses are hidden from consumers.
#My sugar story full
That mixture goes down nice and easy: Critics say the movie is entertaining and informative, and full of disturbing and inconvenient truths about the way we live. To make his theories palatable, Gameau puts a pinch of data into the blender, and mixes up a thick and creamy anecdote spiced with speculation.
What’s most remarkable about the film is the way it passes off these radical ideas-most without any evidence-as common sense if not scientific dogma. If sugar isn’t evil, then it’s at least nefarious, malevolent, and wicked or heinous and corrupt or perfidious and wrong. He also proposes that dietary sugar causes mental fogginess that it leads to bipolar disorder that it makes children fail at school that it has produced a dental health emergency in Appalachia that it may soon drive Australian Aborigines extinct and, indeed, that it could be the source of runaway consumer capitalism. Old news, right? But Gameau is not content to claim that added sugar makes us fat and lazy and unwell. “Sugar isn’t evil,” the film concludes, “but life is so much better when you get rid of it.” But the turning point, he says, came just 18 days into the project, by which point he’d developed fatty liver disease. He puts on 19 pounds, and adds 4 inches to his waist. (These contain enough sugar, in aggregate, to reach a 40-teaspoon daily dose.) You can imagine the results: Gameau’s binge leaves his brain and body in a shambles.
As part of the gimmick, he restricts his diet to packaged foods that may not seem so junky at first glance: granola bars, breakfast drinks, something called “fruit bites,” and so on. In the mold of Super Size Me, Gameau makes himself the guinea pig.
Made by actor Damon Gameau, That Sugar Film tells the story of a two-month–long experiment in self-destructive eating: What happens when a person eats 40 teaspoons of sugar every day? One of the most popular family films in America right now, if you go by digital sales, is an Australian documentary about sugar.
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