A Thumbs Up Media Review
Fat Head
Tom Naughton
Produced by Susan Smiley/Vine Street Pictures
Review by Tim Boyd
Here we have a health video with a sense of humor. Tom Naughton starts off by asking some tough questions about the film “Super Size Me.” For instance, you have to do a whole lot of eating to take in over 5000 calories a day, as Spurlock claimed he did. Even super-sized McMeals three times a day need a lot of supplemental desserts to add up to 5000 calories. As Tom is talking about all this you see many shots of very obese people on the streets. He noted that it took him a lot longer to find very obese people to film than he would have expected based on popular media and government reports on obesity (and he makes some interesting points about why that is). So he decided to perform his own little experiment.
Mr. Naughton weighed 206 pounds, his cholesterol was 231, and he had a little over 31 percent body fat according to his doctor at the start of his twenty-eight-day fast food diet. On this diet, he concentrated on keeping the carbs low and ate plenty of saturated fat. His experience is interspersed with interviews of Dr. Al Sears, and Drs. Michael and Mary Eades. We also see the familiar faces of Sally Fallon and Dr. Mary Enig several times through the video. (There is also a bonus section with more detailed interviews loaded with excellent information.) He goes into some detail on the work of Gary Taubes, exposing the simplistic fallacy of how calorie counting is done by mainstream nutritionists. We learn about the duplicity of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which promoted trans fats for years, then turned around and sued fast food companies for using trans fat when the prevailing politics on trans fat shifted.
The funniest point in “Fat Head” comes when, after twenty-eight days on fast food, Naughton returns to his doctor to tell him what he has been eating (hamburgers, fried chicken, eggs, etc.). The doctor is naturally unimpressed and starts collecting vital statistics to assess the damage. First is the weigh-in. Mr. Naughton is now 194 pounds. Already his doctor has a puzzled look on his face and says,“I don’t like what you’re proving here.” Cholesterol was 222 and body fat was 28.2 percent. The good doctor tried to argue with the results but admittedly really couldn’t.
This film gets a thumbs up but you do need to be careful what you take away from it. The information from the various experts he interviewed is impeccable. If a viewer wanted to, however, he might jump to the conclusion that living on the “right kind” of fast food is okay (it’s not, just in case you’re wondering).
“Fat Head” is an entertaining way to underscore the fact that saturated animal fat is not the deadly poison it is cracked up to be even when present in the industrial fast food supply. And it is reassuring to know that “No fat people were harmed during the making of this documentary.”
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2009.
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Tom Naughton also has a funny article on October 26th on Bad Science. The article is called “What if mechanics and nutritionists switched jobs?” It’s a lot shorter and funnier than The Town Of Allopath. One of the readers’ comments was a variation, “what if bariatric surgeons worked as mechanics?”
Good Information In a Highly Flawed Package
I lean heavily toward low carb/paleo and think the “conventional wisdom” is full of holes, but I don’t think “Fat Head” does a good job (at all) of advancing the argument to the uninitiated.
The attack on Morgan Spurlock is misguided, and Naughton’s counter-experiment proves nothing. Spurlock went on an extreme binge which everyone, including Spurlock, expected in advance to cause weight gain and other negative effects (“duh”), which he wanted to document on film. It was more of an exercise in “performance art” than in science, and meant to simply to provoke the viewer into the thinking a bit about the possible consequences of regularly ingesting the same kind of food over a lifetime.
Naughton, on the other hand, takes in an actual caloric deficit, with restricted carbs, and regular exercise, and then experiences a weight loss. How does Naughton’s experiment in any way “rebut” Spurlock’s? And, given the fact that Naughton goes on to argue that restricting carbs is more important than lowering calorie intake, his own experiment is useless to prove either strategy, since he cut intake of both calories AND carbs.
The film is poorly organized and produced, and is undermined at every turn by the injection of sophomoric humor. In a typically tedious sequence, the snarky Naughton asks people on the street if they have ever collapsed with a heart attack immediately after eating fettuccine alfredo. Tres dumb. Especially when you consider that a plate-full of pasta smothered in cream, butter, and cheese is a food that both low carb and low fat eaters would want to avoid eating often. In one of his failed attempts at humor (in a scene showing his own wife in bed), she asks if he is a moron, and in that moment she seems to speak on behalf of the viewer.
Worst of all is the ongoing anti-government Libertarian ideology that underscores Naughton’s narrative. He argues that anyone “with a functioning brain” can make proper food choices, but at the same time argues that the public has been deluged with mountains of false information and bad advice for decades. The film is littered with such logical inconsistencies. Naughton’s gratuitous political agenda shows up in some bizarre assertions, like when he argues that higher tendency toward obesity among the poor is merely the result of a predisposition among non-whites toward “thicker” bodies, and the assertion that court-mandated busing to achieve racial desegregation contributed to overweight school children. These theories simply detract from the credibility of the diet and health science he eventually discusses. Naughton is entitled to whatever political views he wishes, but injecting them into a documentary about nutrition and health does nothing to advance an essentially purely scientific subject.
At his blog and in interviews like the one above, Naughton comes off considerably better than in the amateurish film that he actually made. If you know anyone “with a functioning brain” that is still clinging to the conventional wisdom that you’d like to convert, showing them “Fat Head” may not be the best way to get them to become more open-minded, thanks to the many mis-guided and unhelpful aspects of the film.
Excellent Film
Naughton did very well with this film. It’s a very low budget project that gets the message out there against what we have been taught, brain-washed, about saturated fat. Not sure why, Carl, a previous poster is so inflamed by the message. It’s truth.
I think Carl may be overthinking the film and I get the sense that he viewed it with a negative frame of mind from the start instead of just accepting it for what it is. Fat Head is an amusing, light documentary designed to give the average person something to think about. Personally, it’s one of my favorite dvds to lend to people that are in need of a little cognitive dissonance.
What is Carl talking about?
At no point in this film did Tom discuss limiting calories. He had only one rule and that was keeping carbs around 100 gms. Some days he went below that, other days he was as high as the 130s.
What happens with the low carb, high fat diet is that the satiety level of eating a higher fat content tends to reduce one’s appetite. Thus, the body’s need to eat less calories is a result of natural tendency, not an intended one.
entertaining, thought provoking
I totally disagree with Carl. Even my kids loved the film. They watched it three or four times. They especially thought the guy from cspi was hysterical. I think that Carl missed the point McNaughton was making. He took issue with the vegetarian, anti meat and fat, agenda of Morgan Sherlock, as well as the “people are dummies and need to be treated like children by the government” mentality. People are not dummies and it is a ridiculous idea that laws should be passed by the government to interfere with what we eat. The government has done a pathetic job of giving nutritional advice. If it could force us to eat the way it thinks best what a horrible world that would be. It would be a totalitarian socialist/communist world without freedom, which is far worse than some people eating too much junk. The way to change things is by education like WAPF does, and by increasing demand in the marketplace. Tom Naughton is however firmly in the low carb camp which villifies carbs just about as badly and unjustifiably as fat has been villified. Dr. Price studied healthy people who ate 70% of calories from carbs. What the low carb promoters like Taubes, Eades, etc. are missing is that it is refined carbs that are the problem and resulting nutrient deficiencies. As long as the people Dr Price studied stayed away from refined foods they didn’t develop insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity, etc.