Welcome to Debate Club! Please be aware that this is a space for respectful debate, and that your ideas will be challenged here. Please remember to critique the argument, not the author.

Fed Up: documentary

123457»

Replies

  • cayenne_007
    cayenne_007 Posts: 671 Member
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.

    The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.

    When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.

    Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.

    Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.

    The bolded is a bit misleading imo. Making good choices is a good thing. Making good choices in the correct amounts is another. My diet is loaded with lots that is considered bad from donuts and cereal to twinkies, alongside a lot of stuff considered good by most camps.

    I just don't over eat and maintain at ~180lbs pretty easily.

    I agree - portion size is everything, and most people are especially poor judges at what constitutes a portion size.

    For instance: my local grocery store sells apples in two sizes, one called lunchbox size and the other called regular. The USDA's website shows that for 100g, an apple has 52 calories; at 154g that goes up to 80 calories. How many people would be able to eyeball the two apples side by side and realize just how much of a calorie difference that is? And we're talking about something rather calorie low to begin with. There are some things that just a little bit more can equate to a huge difference in calorie content, such as peanut butter or almonds.

    Yep. Peanut butter is usually my go to example because who is REALLY satisfied with a level tablespoon? Even a "responsible" amount spread out on a slice of bread can actually equal out to 2 or 3 servings, which, depending on brand, could easily add ~380 calories but still look thin on the bread.

    Good point.

    I LOVE to have apple slices and peanut butter for lunch. I manage the amount of peanut butter I consume by buying the Jif to-go cups. That way I'm not getting one more dab and stay at 250 fabulous calories.

    (Doesn't make peanut butter the devil)

  • FibroHiker
    FibroHiker Posts: 347 Member
    mmapags wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    J72FIT wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    J72FIT wrote: »
    J72FIT wrote: »
    No food can be labeled good, bad, healthy, or unhealthy without context and dose....

    ol98yta004gb.jpg

    A picture says a thousand words... =)

    There is absolutely no way I balance my eating with the occasional donut and not expect to gain weight.

    Yet I can. So is the problem the diet or the dieter?

    So I guess after all thatyou CAN say the problem is me.

    I think that (and the post you're replying to) is unrealistically stark, especially in context of the thread.

    The thread was (I think) about Fed Up, and the discussion began over whether it was presenting an accurate picture of the obesity crisis, and (more implicitly) whether its message would be helpful to reducing obesity as a population-scale problem.

    When we take obesity down to an individual scale, we all have individual struggles or challenges. Those are part of our personal context; they may not provide useful insights at the population-wide scale (though it's likely that any individual challenge that applies to you or me also applies to some others, and sharing our strategies at an individual level can be helpful, of course).

    You have a relatively low calorie goal as compared with your satiation needs, so you can't fit in certain high-calorie theoretically tasty foods** while simultaneously feeling full and satisfied, and also accomplishing your weight-management goals. (** Theoretical only because I don't personally enjoy donuts ;) ).

    That situation's unfortunate, I can see how it creates a challenge for you, and I'm sorry that that's true for you (among others). But it's a problem that doesn't apply to everyone, as others in the thread have described.

    As a somewhat-similar example ***, I have a torn meniscus and osteoarthritis in knees and hips. Unless I want to experience severe pain, and accelerate my need for disruptive surgery, I can't run for exercise. I've read things that say you aren't fit if you can't run a mile at X speed. If a documentary said that, I could take that as a sign that I'm disadvantaged and can never be fit, so I might as well give up (which is an unhelpful conclusion for me individually). That doesn't make running bad, or unable to be a part of an overall healthy routine or make it completely useless in a context where we'd like to reduce population-wide obesity. It's just my personal context (and also true for some other people).

    Similarly, if donuts rock someone's world, and they can't possibly sustain a reduced calorie regimen without eating one now and then, but they in reality could've fit them in, the idea that donuts (or sugar, or carbs, or bread, or whatever non-poisonous thing) are inherently "bad", and that no one can possibly manage their weight if they ever eat them . . . that's an unhelpful conclusion for some people, who are in a different context from you.

    A documentary that makes that kind of argument in a broad way is unhelpful for many people. It's not nuanced or insightful.

    Reading the forums here, I've seen many people (I'm not saying a majority, because I don't know) who say that they've failed at weight loss over and over because they thought they had to give up certain "bad" foods forever, but that learning the science behind calories and weight were the magic that helped them actually achieve their goals: They can manage their weight, and have a donut occasionally, it isn't universally either/or. Again, not everyone can fit in that donut, just as I can't run for exercise. My personal context doesn't invalidate the core issue.

    *** Side note: I'm aware that I'm comparing something a lot of people consider "bad" (donuts) with something a lot of people consider "good" (running). (It does depend on whom you ask, though ;) ). But the point is that broadly defining either of those things as inherently "good" or inherently "bad" doesn't contribute to useful, nuanced discussion.

    If you can't eat donuts, but wish you could, I'm sorry that that's true, just as I'm sorry I can't run for exercise. Individually, we need to find another workable path.

    Personally, I feel quite negative about any broadside position that unnecessarily disempowers people. Books or documentaries that leave people feeling they're helpless victims (of big corporations, or sugar, or whatever) are fundamentally disempowering.

    Any individual situation becomes more manageable if we assess it in terms of what we personally and individually can influence or control, because those are the points where we can create leverage for change. To me, communicating the truth about food, movement and weight (as most sources like WHO and USDA try to do, BTW) is empowering. Most of us have quite complete control over what we put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, and how often and how much we move our bodies.

    Documentaries that distract us from those facts are not very helpful at the population scale. But hardly anyone wants to watch a documentary that says we should eat less and move more, because we kinda don't want to do that. ;)
    Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.

    The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.

    When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.

    Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.

    Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.

    But isn't the simple first possible answer that she was eating too much? You can eat too much nutritious food. You can out-eat exercise. You can exercise for an hour each day but sit on the couch for the rest of it and need less calories than you want.

    And you keep conflating health with weight loss. A person can eat healthy foods and become overweight by eating too much of them. A person can eat a mixture of whole and processed foods and eat the right amount of calories to maintain a healthy weight. And if a person is carefully choosing processed foods looking for appropriate fiber, protein, and fat levels they could eat a mostly processed diet and maintain a healthy weight at the right calorie level.

    The bolded is a key part of my life story. Vegetarian for 45 years, eating the whole grains and other good stuff, mostly. Overweight and obese for something like 30+ years, because I ate waaay too much of them . . . and during the last roughly 15 years of that, I was very active, quite fit, and even competing as a masters' athlete while obese (not a star, but in the pack, not performing pathetically poorly).

    That's part of why I'm so convinced that it's more about how much one eats, than what one eats . . . and about how that amount (of calories) compares to calorie expenditure, not about exercise per se. It's fairly challenging to add 500 calories of additional activity to one's day; it's frighteningly easy to add 500 calories of additional food.

    I've done that experiment; it ended poorly. Well, until I changed the intake to be calorically smaller than output, back in 2015. ;)

    I am one of many with a similar story. I'm not vegetarian. But I always ate a healthy, primarily whole foods diet with very little highly processed food from boxes. Put on about 40 pounds above a healthy weight eating this way, mainly because I didn't pay any attention to calories for a long time.

    It was any lack of knowledge about good nutrition on my part. I was a chef. I was intimately familiar with the nutritional content of food and how to construct a diet with lots of nutrient dense foods. I didn't buy lots of packaged stuff that had words like "healthy" or "lean" on them because I would look past those labels to the nutrition panel and the ingredients.

    I still eat this way. Even more so now that I retired to Oaxaca, MX where there are amazing Mercados with all kinds of wonderful fresh items!! The difference is that, about 8 years ago, I started paying attention to calories and lost that 40 lbs (have since put about 8 back on in a slow bulk for muscle building). I am at a healthy weight and have great bloodwork.

    To me, the issue with these documentaries is they are editorials, not news. The facts are always slanted to suite the hypothesis of the creator. Personally, I prefer studies and scholarly articles from trusted sources to any documentaries. Facts and conclusions suggested instead of editorial comment. And I even view those sources with a critical eye as to how they are constructed and the bias of the researchers.

    I don't disagree and the fact that some information is being presented as a slanted editorial rather than presentation of facts does harm in that people tend to dispute the presentation as being entirely false (as seen in this thread).

    My takeaway from watching the documentary: I needed to more closely examine the food I am eating, the decisions I make regarding that food, and the reasons why.
  • FibroHiker
    FibroHiker Posts: 347 Member
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.

    The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.

    When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.

    Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.

    Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.

    The bolded is a bit misleading imo. Making good choices is a good thing. Making good choices in the correct amounts is another. My diet is loaded with lots that is considered bad from donuts and cereal to twinkies, alongside a lot of stuff considered good by most camps.

    I just don't over eat and maintain at ~180lbs pretty easily.

    I agree - portion size is everything, and most people are especially poor judges at what constitutes a portion size.

    For instance: my local grocery store sells apples in two sizes, one called lunchbox size and the other called regular. The USDA's website shows that for 100g, an apple has 52 calories; at 154g that goes up to 80 calories. How many people would be able to eyeball the two apples side by side and realize just how much of a calorie difference that is? And we're talking about something rather calorie low to begin with. There are some things that just a little bit more can equate to a huge difference in calorie content, such as peanut butter or almonds.

    Yep. Peanut butter is usually my go to example because who is REALLY satisfied with a level tablespoon? Even a "responsible" amount spread out on a slice of bread can actually equal out to 2 or 3 servings, which, depending on brand, could easily add ~380 calories but still look thin on the bread.

    Good point.

    I LOVE to have apple slices and peanut butter for lunch. I manage the amount of peanut butter I consume by buying the Jif to-go cups. That way I'm not getting one more dab and stay at 250 fabulous calories.

    (Doesn't make peanut butter the devil)

    I actually do feel satiated when I scoop out two tbsp. of natural peanut butter and eat it with celery sticks. It's a really good snack for me. Would I only do 1 tbsp of peanut butter?
  • Phirrgus
    Phirrgus Posts: 1,902 Member
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.

    The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.

    When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.

    Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.

    Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.

    The bolded is a bit misleading imo. Making good choices is a good thing. Making good choices in the correct amounts is another. My diet is loaded with lots that is considered bad from donuts and cereal to twinkies, alongside a lot of stuff considered good by most camps.

    I just don't over eat and maintain at ~180lbs pretty easily.

    I agree - portion size is everything, and most people are especially poor judges at what constitutes a portion size.

    For instance: my local grocery store sells apples in two sizes, one called lunchbox size and the other called regular. The USDA's website shows that for 100g, an apple has 52 calories; at 154g that goes up to 80 calories. How many people would be able to eyeball the two apples side by side and realize just how much of a calorie difference that is? And we're talking about something rather calorie low to begin with. There are some things that just a little bit more can equate to a huge difference in calorie content, such as peanut butter or almonds.

    Yep. Peanut butter is usually my go to example because who is REALLY satisfied with a level tablespoon? Even a "responsible" amount spread out on a slice of bread can actually equal out to 2 or 3 servings, which, depending on brand, could easily add ~380 calories but still look thin on the bread.

    Good point.

    I LOVE to have apple slices and peanut butter for lunch. I manage the amount of peanut butter I consume by buying the Jif to-go cups. That way I'm not getting one more dab and stay at 250 fabulous calories.

    (Doesn't make peanut butter the devil)

    You're the 2nd or 3rd person who mentioned those to go cups to me. I need to get off the fence and buy them lol.

    And I completely agree, about PB or any food really. I LOVE to eat, so why would I want to make food the enemy? It's so much more satisfying to plan something in, like I do with PB now. I'll eat short all day so I can have 800 calories worth of PB and my favorite crackers for a snack later.

    If I go over o:) well...no one made me do it. Food is just food. I do agree marketing and labeling can be a sham, but again, no one makes me buy it, pile it on a plate and eat it. I do that with much enjoyment all by myself lol.
  • Phirrgus
    Phirrgus Posts: 1,902 Member
    mmapags wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    J72FIT wrote: »
    aidydh wrote: »
    J72FIT wrote: »
    J72FIT wrote: »
    No food can be labeled good, bad, healthy, or unhealthy without context and dose....

    ol98yta004gb.jpg

    A picture says a thousand words... =)

    There is absolutely no way I balance my eating with the occasional donut and not expect to gain weight.

    Yet I can. So is the problem the diet or the dieter?

    So I guess after all thatyou CAN say the problem is me.

    I think that (and the post you're replying to) is unrealistically stark, especially in context of the thread.

    The thread was (I think) about Fed Up, and the discussion began over whether it was presenting an accurate picture of the obesity crisis, and (more implicitly) whether its message would be helpful to reducing obesity as a population-scale problem.

    When we take obesity down to an individual scale, we all have individual struggles or challenges. Those are part of our personal context; they may not provide useful insights at the population-wide scale (though it's likely that any individual challenge that applies to you or me also applies to some others, and sharing our strategies at an individual level can be helpful, of course).

    You have a relatively low calorie goal as compared with your satiation needs, so you can't fit in certain high-calorie theoretically tasty foods** while simultaneously feeling full and satisfied, and also accomplishing your weight-management goals. (** Theoretical only because I don't personally enjoy donuts ;) ).

    That situation's unfortunate, I can see how it creates a challenge for you, and I'm sorry that that's true for you (among others). But it's a problem that doesn't apply to everyone, as others in the thread have described.

    As a somewhat-similar example ***, I have a torn meniscus and osteoarthritis in knees and hips. Unless I want to experience severe pain, and accelerate my need for disruptive surgery, I can't run for exercise. I've read things that say you aren't fit if you can't run a mile at X speed. If a documentary said that, I could take that as a sign that I'm disadvantaged and can never be fit, so I might as well give up (which is an unhelpful conclusion for me individually). That doesn't make running bad, or unable to be a part of an overall healthy routine or make it completely useless in a context where we'd like to reduce population-wide obesity. It's just my personal context (and also true for some other people).

    Similarly, if donuts rock someone's world, and they can't possibly sustain a reduced calorie regimen without eating one now and then, but they in reality could've fit them in, the idea that donuts (or sugar, or carbs, or bread, or whatever non-poisonous thing) are inherently "bad", and that no one can possibly manage their weight if they ever eat them . . . that's an unhelpful conclusion for some people, who are in a different context from you.

    A documentary that makes that kind of argument in a broad way is unhelpful for many people. It's not nuanced or insightful.

    Reading the forums here, I've seen many people (I'm not saying a majority, because I don't know) who say that they've failed at weight loss over and over because they thought they had to give up certain "bad" foods forever, but that learning the science behind calories and weight were the magic that helped them actually achieve their goals: They can manage their weight, and have a donut occasionally, it isn't universally either/or. Again, not everyone can fit in that donut, just as I can't run for exercise. My personal context doesn't invalidate the core issue.

    *** Side note: I'm aware that I'm comparing something a lot of people consider "bad" (donuts) with something a lot of people consider "good" (running). (It does depend on whom you ask, though ;) ). But the point is that broadly defining either of those things as inherently "good" or inherently "bad" doesn't contribute to useful, nuanced discussion.

    If you can't eat donuts, but wish you could, I'm sorry that that's true, just as I'm sorry I can't run for exercise. Individually, we need to find another workable path.

    Personally, I feel quite negative about any broadside position that unnecessarily disempowers people. Books or documentaries that leave people feeling they're helpless victims (of big corporations, or sugar, or whatever) are fundamentally disempowering.

    Any individual situation becomes more manageable if we assess it in terms of what we personally and individually can influence or control, because those are the points where we can create leverage for change. To me, communicating the truth about food, movement and weight (as most sources like WHO and USDA try to do, BTW) is empowering. Most of us have quite complete control over what we put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, and how often and how much we move our bodies.

    Documentaries that distract us from those facts are not very helpful at the population scale. But hardly anyone wants to watch a documentary that says we should eat less and move more, because we kinda don't want to do that. ;)
    Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.

    The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.

    When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.

    Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.

    Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.

    But isn't the simple first possible answer that she was eating too much? You can eat too much nutritious food. You can out-eat exercise. You can exercise for an hour each day but sit on the couch for the rest of it and need less calories than you want.

    And you keep conflating health with weight loss. A person can eat healthy foods and become overweight by eating too much of them. A person can eat a mixture of whole and processed foods and eat the right amount of calories to maintain a healthy weight. And if a person is carefully choosing processed foods looking for appropriate fiber, protein, and fat levels they could eat a mostly processed diet and maintain a healthy weight at the right calorie level.

    The bolded is a key part of my life story. Vegetarian for 45 years, eating the whole grains and other good stuff, mostly. Overweight and obese for something like 30+ years, because I ate waaay too much of them . . . and during the last roughly 15 years of that, I was very active, quite fit, and even competing as a masters' athlete while obese (not a star, but in the pack, not performing pathetically poorly).

    That's part of why I'm so convinced that it's more about how much one eats, than what one eats . . . and about how that amount (of calories) compares to calorie expenditure, not about exercise per se. It's fairly challenging to add 500 calories of additional activity to one's day; it's frighteningly easy to add 500 calories of additional food.

    I've done that experiment; it ended poorly. Well, until I changed the intake to be calorically smaller than output, back in 2015. ;)

    I am one of many with a similar story. I'm not vegetarian. But I always ate a healthy, primarily whole foods diet with very little highly processed food from boxes. Put on about 40 pounds above a healthy weight eating this way, mainly because I didn't pay any attention to calories for a long time.

    It was any lack of knowledge about good nutrition on my part. I was a chef. I was intimately familiar with the nutritional content of food and how to construct a diet with lots of nutrient dense foods. I didn't buy lots of packaged stuff that had words like "healthy" or "lean" on them because I would look past those labels to the nutrition panel and the ingredients.

    I still eat this way. Even more so now that I retired to Oaxaca, MX where there are amazing Mercados with all kinds of wonderful fresh items!! The difference is that, about 8 years ago, I started paying attention to calories and lost that 40 lbs (have since put about 8 back on in a slow bulk for muscle building). I am at a healthy weight and have great bloodwork.

    To me, the issue with these documentaries is they are editorials, not news. The facts are always slanted to suite the hypothesis of the creator. Personally, I prefer studies and scholarly articles from trusted sources to any documentaries. Facts and conclusions suggested instead of editorial comment. And I even view those sources with a critical eye as to how they are constructed and the bias of the researchers.

    Just a side note: I do not have nearly the knowledge regarding nutrition that you do, and yet still lost weight and maintain with few to no problems.

    That doesn't leave much in the way of excuses to fall back on. :)

    That said, I'm fully aware there are medical outliers out there. No disrespect to you folks at all. I'm speaking primarily about people who do not have a medical condition that may require certain drugs etc.