Must Watch: Fat Fiction
Fat Fiction is just that, a deep yet comprehensive dive into the beliefs that are false regarding dietary fat consumption. This documentary provides an overview of the history, health implications, controversy, and financial burden our current dietary recommendations carry. It features medical professionals, journalists, dietitians, and average Americans who challenge the current dietary recommendations and experience for themselves, how what you eat can influence every aspect of your life.
This documentary begins with a question: “How did we get here?” Then we are taken back to 1955 and the health scare of President Eisenhower. During this time Americans, healthcare workers, and politicians begin to focus their attention, more than ever, on heart disease and its potential causes. Nutrition research, interest, and concern rise over the decades.
With many voices at the table, rushed research and some cherrypicked information, the low-fat high-carbohydrate dietary recommendations take hold in 1980, confidently endorsed by the government. Processed food production explodes, intake of high-fat foods like butter, whole milk, red meat, and eggs tanks, while consumption of refined grains and sugar skyrockets. Fat Fiction provides an overview of the changes that have occurred over the past 65 years, along with how and why the dietary dogma persists today.
The movie takes the story a step further by offering numerous personal accounts of individuals who took their health and wellness into their own hands and challenged prevailing recommendations. We hear from a variety of people, from pilots, medical doctors, and journalists to athletes and traditionally trained dietitians. Three individuals participate in a two-week experiment. One week of high-fat, low-carb eating (20 grams or less of carbohydrates per day), followed by a week of the USDA My Plate-approved high-carb way of eating. Participants track not only their individual symptoms and experiences, but also blood glucose, cholesterol, and more. The results are shocking!
The film concludes with practical alternatives to our current way of eating. It provides specific insight as to why the “calories in, calories out” mentality of weight loss doesn’t work and why certain types of dietary fats are essential for health. It touches on the ubiquitous nature of processed sugar, grains, and vegetable oils – and how we’ve been fooled to believe these foods are essential and healthy.
If you, or anyone you know, has struggled with energy fluctuations, brain fog, fatigue, persistent weight gain, imbalances in blood sugar, inflammation, or chronic health challenges, Fat Fiction provides hope amidst a culture that accepts these health issues as a normal part of life. This documentary offers insight, inspiration, education, and a bleak look at a dietary dogma that most have never reconsidered.
Join narrator Mark Hyman, along with Tim Noakes, Nina Teicholz, Zoe Harcombe, Sarah Hallberg, and many more health and wellness heroes in this deep nutrition analysis. It throws everything you though you knew about nutrition “upside down and backwards.”
Now streaming on Amazon and Vimeo on-demand: https://fatfiction.movie/
– Reviewed by Coach Madisen