I love documentaries and nerding out over a good one before going to bed. Doesn’t matter the topic really, but since changing my eating habits, food ones have really been catching my eye. “Super-Size Me” is food documentary classic, one that has had a significant impact on not just me, but it gained an incredibly wide audience because of its first of its kind experiment on what certain foods can really do to the body.
I remember watching that movie for the first time at my mom’s best friends house – our two families having a movie night and cringing and yelping at the really disgusting parts (like him puking, finding a hair in his food, and how chicken nuggets, my favorite McDonald’s item, were made.)
The movie was revolutionary for its time – McDonald’s stopped making super-sizing a thing after that movie!
Well, in the same fashion of “Super-Size Me” where Morgan Spurlock went on a McDonal’s binge for 30 days, comes “That Sugar Film” in which an Aussie Damon Gameau embarks on a high sugar diet for 60 days to see what it did to the body.
Before Damon began his journey, he ate as a baseline, like I do. No filler food carbs – his normal diet consisted of healthy fats, animal proteins, veggies. From his commentary it sounded like he consumed dairy (full fat) but that was the only difference I could find in his normal eating habits.
Anyway, Damon was dubbed “healthier than average” by the physicians he asked to monitor his progress and change over his journey. As a part of his high sugar diet, Damon had to consume 40 teaspoons of sugar in his diet per day. Now, while that may seem like a lot, shockingly that’s how much the average person consumes daily.
Now Damon could have taken an easy route and just added ice cream a few times a day to hit that number, but instead, he was tasked to hit that by eating “healthy” foods, or what most consider to be healthy, like low fat yogurt, granola, juice, etc.
He thought it would be a whole lot harder than it was to hit that number, but it was too easy. What happened to him and his body over the course of 60 days was astonishing.
He gained about 20 pounds, liver turned to fat, had high levels of everything, had manic mood swings, crashes, cravings, and depended on sugar.
Sound familiar?
Well, he debunked a whole lot of myths that we’ve been talking about proving what we’ve been saying all along — consuming fat is not the problem (low fat foods made him fatter) calories were not the problem (while the content of the foods were different his total calorie input was the same). Sugar is what makes people fat. Whether its glucose in pasta or lactose in dairy or the obvious table sugar in cake, it all comes down to one thing, and it’s highly addictive, too.
For anyone who doesn’t think sugar isn’t toxic, or for anyone who wants their beliefs affirmed, this movie is a must see. It was far better than I thought it would be — I had high standards for it being in the same light of “Super-Size Me!”
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