Fat Head

One of the benefits of being a strong atheist is that all of your critical thinking skills get a good workout on a regular basis. It helps to have a plethora of skeptics among your pack of associates to draw good habits from.

It is with this ammunition on board that I watched "Fat Head" a documentary by Tom Naughton. The purpose of the movie is ostensibly to debunk some of the myths in that other documentary, "Super Size Me", which it does, to a point. However, it comes at this task with a libertarian bias, which may tend to turn some more socialist audience members off. It doesn't help when Naughton uses some of the same unfortunate argumentative techniques that many other incendiary documentarians use to support their subject matter. Several times he hits the streets to interview bystanders, posing questions using false dichotomies as bait, like "If I buy fries, will you force me to eat them?" or asking others how many times they've eaten Pasta Alfredo and then how many heart attacks they had as a result. Several times, a cukoo sound was used to punctuate a few dubious opinions by vegetarian protagonists. The ad-homs and strawmen were flying. In the end, government gets the blame for regulating food industries in ways that make it easier for people to make themselves fat - quite a diversion from the initial argument that we only have ourselves to blame.

This is unfortunate, because there did seem to be quite a quite a bit of good scientific information related to lipids, saturated fats, cholesterol and insulin, accompanied by humorous, but helpful graphics. Though I can't speak for the veracity of the science, not being an expert myself, it did open the door to more paths of research to understand better why what we eat makes us fat.

I suppose that having an underlying agenda helps to inspire a more dramatic and entertaining argument. It doesn't help the cause though. I'm not a big fan of defamation, and I'm seriously trying to wean myself off of tribalism. If this documentary was created merely to clear up some of the factual errors, exaggerations, cherry-picked data, and biases of the previous one, it could have done it quite successfully without falling prey to the same tactics. Still, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. If you thought about seeing this, do so, albeit with your critical wits intact. If you haven't seen Super Size Me, you might want to watch that first though, again, taken with a grain of salt.