As our unnamed heroine slumps through afternoon traffic, exhausted and crestfallen from another arduous day of swilling diet coke by the pallid light of a word processor, she turns on the car radio to find a pertinent message being broadcasted.
“…So many people want to know about diets because so many people are going to try them, but they don’t work … some weight will be lost temporarily.” Harvey Diamond, author, was speaking. “But let me ask you something – do you want to be healthy temporarily? No. But you want to lose weight temporarily. They’re – They have failures built right into them.”
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Hungry for Change is the recent documentary by the nutritional-consultants-turned-directors James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch. This duo, along with producer Enzo Tedeschi, are the minds behind Food Matters, another trouped film denouncing modern diets. Hungry for Change sets out to achieve more than prior films in this sub-genre of documentaries by offering a supposed ‘solution’ to the many issues that are brought up.
They do this by not just driving home the point made by the previous movie on making clear the terribleness of a processed food diet, but by inherently offering a proposition to the audience to move to more natural diet (e.g., paleolithic diets, raw vegan or vegetarian, ‘juicing’) and utilizing a holistic approach to dieting. There was also a fair warning against ‘fad dieting’ in the first half of the movie, as well as an overarching philosophy towards dieting for health as opposed to weight.
The film immediately sets the tone from the very beginning by presenting various interdisciplinary ‘experts’ who equally have part in narrating the film throughout. As the argument develops, however, the narrators seem to hav...
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...ll, the accuracy and fairness of the arguments presented within suffer from the financial interest of those professionals within the movie. The argument stilts itself on the ethos attributed to the perceived authority figures, attributing correlation as causation, in order to drive home a marketable lifestyle that focuses more on pathos-laden reasoning than on a logical foundation. Based on the potential demographic, it could very well be effective to achieving the goal of those involved with the film.
If this is at all indicative of any other films within this genre, than it highlights a troubling pattern within modern nutritional documentaries. The money spent on this films post production would be better used on doing actual research to back up the claims made. While the traditional Americans diet is definitely hungry for change, it is also starving for science.
“Food as thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating,” is an article written by Mary Maxfield in response or reaction to Michael Pollan’s “Escape from the Western Diet”. Michael Pollan tried to enlighten the readers about what they should eat or not in order to stay healthy by offering and proposing a simple theory: “the elimination of processed foods” (443).
There are many different beliefs about the proper way to eat healthy. People are often mislead and live unhealthy lifestyles as a result. Both Mary Maxfield and Michael Pollan explain their own beliefs on what a healthy diet is and how to live a healthy lifestyle. In the essay, “Escape from the Western diet” Michael Pollan writes about the flaws of the western diet and how we can correct these problems to become healthier. In the essay, “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating”, Mary Maxfield criticizes Michael Pollan’s essay about eating healthy, and explains her own theory on how to be healthy. She believes that Pollan is contradicting himself and that what he is stating is false. Mary Maxfield ponders the
Not once in the film did they distinguish between bad calories and good calories. In fact during the film they talked about how if you take in so many calories, you need to burn almost all of those off. This would be ideal if you were eating all junk food, but what if we thought in a responsible manner and ate the same amount of calories in healthy foods? The film generalizes all calories and basically ignores the personal responsibility of
In the documentary, Food Inc., we get an inside look at the secrets and horrors of the food industry. The director, Robert Kenner, argues that most Americans have no idea where their food comes from or what happens to it before they put it in their bodies. To him, this is a major issue and a great danger to society as a whole. One of the conclusions of this documentary is that we should not blindly trust the food companies, and we should ultimately be more concerned with what we are eating and feeding to our children. Through his investigations, he hopes to lift the veil from the hidden world of food.
The 2009 movie Food Inc. describes the major role that food production plays within many lives. This movie revealed that there is a very small variety of companies that consumers purchase their food from. These few companies actually control what is out on the shelves and what we put into our bodies. These companies have changed food production into a food production business. Many of these companies experiment with ways to create large quantities of food at low production costs to result in an enormous amount of profit for themselves. Some of the production cost cuts also result in less healthy food for the population. Instead of worrying about the health of the population, the companies are worried about what will make them the most money.
In a society that is facing numerous problems, such as economic devastation, one major problem is often disregarded, growing obesity. As the American society keeps growing, so does growth of the fast food industry and the epidemic of obesity. In order to further investigate the main cause of obesity, Morgan Spurlock, the film director and main character, decides to criticize the fast food industry for its connection with obesity in America. In his documentary Spurlock performs a radical experiment that drives him to eat only from McDonald's and order a super-sized meal whenever he is asked. By including visual and textual techniques, rhetorical appeals, and argumentative evidences, Morgan Spurlock was able to help viewers know the risks of fast food and how it has caused America to be the world's “fattest country”.
As obesity and medical problems due to diet become a larger issue within society, it is imperative to educate humans on the importance of maintaining a healthy diet. This is exactly what Hungry for Change does. One of the key points made in the documentary is that humans no longer eat a natural diet like their ancestors did; when humans first began to inhabit the Earth they lived off a diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats. During these periods famine and disease was rampant, so humans adapted to store nutrition more productively. Now that humans live in a more developed society, they have a (practically) unlimited supply of food. However, much of this food is processed and manipulated to have a better flavour and a longer shelf life, and though this sounds like a positive situation, it has become a huge problem. According to best-selling women’s health author Dr. Christine Northrup, “We’ve lived on Earth for a millennium where there was a food shortage. You’re programmed to put on fat whenever there is food available. Now there’s a lot of food available, but it’s the wrong kind.” (Northrup, as cited in Colquhoun et al., 2012). This is a logical and widely accepted theory as to why humans continue to overindulge on foods despi...
Food has become such a big complicated mess because of the involvement in sciences and politics in food production and distribution. They have all of the power to say and do whatever they want with food and somehow it has ended in obesity epidemic rates and the rates are drastically increasing as the years go on. Michael Moss in his book titled Salt, Sugar, Fat spends three years finding out how food companies manipulated the system and used their products to worsen the health of the public and rack up the money at the same time. He unfolds this situation and dives deep into the problem while giving his feedback on the issue itself. Throughout his book Michael Moss in a complex way, proves to readers by observing the
The documentary "Food, Inc." directed by Robert Kenner opens with the sentence, "The way we eat has changed more dramatically in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000 years.” Later in the film it's pointed out that one of the important changes in what we eat is that our food supply has been flooded with sugar and other refined carbohydrates. It carries a strong and often scathing message against the food and farming industries. It also highlights that what you eat is not always as healthy as you think it is. The documentary focuses on several areas of food production, including meat production, seed production, bad practices and even the organic farming industry. U.S. farming and food industries are dangerous, and people
When it comes to the topic of eating healthy, most of us will readily agree that we all need to. Where this argument usually ends, however, is on the question of how and why. Whereas some are convinced that we don’t need to all be eating healthy foods that are over priced to stay healthy, and others maintain that there is no other way. Bill Gifford talks about a proper diet throughout the book, but one chapter in particular really stands out when it comes to how diet affects our bodies and ultimately our heath. In the chapter Phil Vs. Fat, Gifford tells a story about a man who beats all odds when it comes to changing his life. Our new friend Phil was morbidly obese and had become highly diabetic. Through exercise and eating a more refined diet, he was able to completely reverse his body and his health. Gifford continues to emphasis on Phil’s great feat when he writes, “The doctor was astonished: Bruno’s insulin resistance was gone, his blood values
When we think of our national health we wonder why Americans end up obese, heart disease filled, and diabetic. Michael Pollan’s “ Escape from the Western Diet” suggest that everything we eat has been processed some food to the point where most of could not tell what went into what we ate. Pollan thinks that if America thought more about our “Western diets” of constantly modified foods and begin to shift away from it to a more home grown of mostly plant based diet it could create a more pleasing eating culture. He calls for us to “Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants.” However, Mary Maxfield’s “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating”, argues differently she has the point of view that people simply eat in the wrong amounts. She recommends for others to “Trust yourself. Trust your body. Meet your needs.” The skewed perception of eating will cause you all kinds of health issues, while not eating at all and going skinny will mean that you will remain healthy rather than be anorexic. Then, as Maxfield points out, “We hear go out and Cram your face with Twinkies!”(Maxfield 446) when all that was said was eating as much as you need.
... shadow of his narration suggests the significant influence of Joe’s bias on the manner in which the film is portrayed. The writer claims to represent the voice of empiricism, promising to deliver “the facts…(and) the whole truth” before the story gets “all distorted and blown out of proportion”, but his personality overlays the narration and his supposedly impartial retelling of the series of events contains opinions, editorials, and literary references all too reminiscent of a Hollywood drama. Joe Gillis, being a writer of fiction with an intense personal investment in the story he is telling, cannot be expected to adhere to scientific impartiality. Instead, he illustrates an essential tenet of storytelling and Hollywood mystique, the subjective nature of facts when coupled with human interpretation. Joe Gillis shows how a road can be more than a strip of asphalt.
The emotional feel or atmosphere created by the documentary was just trying to help. You could tell that they want to help people and make sure they are all healthy and can live the right lifestyle. While watching this film I encountered many things I found questionable. I found three claims to be bias/ controversial in this documentary: it uses correlation as causation, they claim someone having health issues can be solved by cutting meat out of their diet, and lastly they only use one study to prove their method, and it is the one that one of the main people in the movie made.
The only problem with Michael Pollan’s outlook on nutritionism is the fact that he is completely against scientific research on the subject because history in this matter has not been reliable. With any good, there is also bad that follows. This relates to scientific research on nutrients which have provided many useful things to society, yet brought some evils such as processed foods which have plagued the American Diet for many years. Amongst all the countries in the world the United States of America has a population in which two-thirds of their people are obese. When it comes to processed foods, people should take this chemically engineered food with a grain of salt, take a more traditional approach and use current knowledge to promote a healthy
Many of fad diets rely on gimmicks, things that makes the diet seem to be unique or more likely to work than other