DC Trawler

Fat Head: the movie Michael Bloomberg doesn’t want you to see

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If you find Morgan Spurlock as annoying and dishonest as I do, you’ll like Fat Head, which I’ve been thinking about since Emperor Bloomberg announced his War on Soda. Fat Head is a highly entertaining and informative (albeit zero-budget) documentary by a guy named Tom Naughton, who decided to try Spurlock’s experiment for himself. Naughton ate nothing but fast food for 30 days, but with two important caveats:

  1. He didn’t eat whatever the clerk suggested, as Spurlock did. In other words, no super-sizing if he didn’t want to.
  2. He kept his carbs to under 100 grams a day and his calories to under 2,000, using publicly available nutritional information about all the national fast-food chains.

Why these two important differences? As Naughton puts it, “Because I have a functioning brain.” If fast-food joints are forcing anybody to eat anything they don’t want to, if they’re making you order more or different food than you choose — the underlying premise of Spurlock’s stupid movie — wouldn’t we have heard about it by now?

Fat Head will open your eyes to all sorts of BS and misinformation that busybodies have been telling you about the food you eat. But the part that’s relevant to Emperor Bloomberg comes at an hour and 15 minutes into the movie. That’s where Naughton traces the history of trans fats, one of Bloomie’s previous crusades. Anybody who’s been paying attention knows that trans fats aren’t good for you. But what you might not know is that the people now decrying trans fats, groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, are the same ones who pushed for trans fats as a “healthy” alternative to animal fats back in the ’80s:

In other words, their meddling only worsened the very problem they were trying to prevent. If you or I made such a disastrously harmful mistake, we’d be mortified. We’d stop telling everybody what to eat. But fortunately for the food cops, they have no sense of shame or they wouldn’t have become food cops in the first place. Hey, at least they gave Emperor Bloomberg yet another excuse to tell people how to live their lives.

By the way — SPOILER ALERT! — after 30 days of eating only at fast-food restaurants, Naughton lost 12 pounds, his body fat went down 3%, and his blood work improved. All by acting like Morgan Spurlock, if Morgan Spurlock had a functioning brain.

You can watch Fat Head right now on Hulu. I highly recommend it. (It’s also on Netflix, if you don’t like all those ads.)

Disclaimer: Over the last 8 months, I’ve lost 45 pounds by cutting out wheat, sugar, and most dairy. (If you want to know why and how I did this, read Wheat Belly by William Davis and The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson.) I don’t drink soda, even diet soda. I don’t eat trans fats. I don’t smoke, and I’ve quit drinking until I hit my target weight because it only slows things down. In other words, I’m Emperor Bloomberg’s dream peasant. I’m not doing any of the stuff he wants to remove from the human experience. And yet somehow I’ve been able to do it without government intervention.* I did it by choice.

That’s just me. It’s none of my business what you eat and drink. Nor is it Bloomberg’s business, or anybody else’s. There are only two words you need to say to anybody who tells you different, and they rhyme with “chuck stew.”

*In fact, I’ve been able to do it by ignoring a lot of the government’s advice. The longer I followed the food pyramid, the more I took on its shape.