Watched the movie Fat Head on Netflix over the weekend. It's a little thought-provoker that if nothing else just shows that we (the people) know so little about nutrition, and we're not getting any good help from the supposed experts.

The movie is a kind of rebuttal to Supersize Me, the 2004 documentary that blames obesity on the likes of McDonald's. In that film, Morgan Spurlock tries to show that bad things happen when you eat too much fast food.

In Fat Head, Tom Naughton tries to show that with just a little care that one could lose weight while eating at McDonald's every day for a month.

He brings to light a counter-point to the Spurlock film and much of the dietary science misconception and (he claims) deception.

In the end, what Fat Head reminds us is that eating sugar (and foods easily converted into sugar) is pretty bad for us, we need a little more exercise, and there's a lot of misconception with cholesterol and saturated fats. In the film, Tom lost 12 pounds in the four weeks of his McDonald's diet, by avoiding sugary soda and the starchy fries, keeping his carb intake to around 100g per day, and his calorie intake near 2000. He also walked about 5 miles per day for exercise.

When we rearranged our diets last year, we also ate low carbs, kept a mindful eye on calories, and increased our activity. With just this little bit of mindfulness, I was able to lose almost 50 pounds in about six months, so much of it has come back. Of course, we've let that mindfulness slip since then, but we're trying a little bit again.

In the end, it isn't just "fast food is bad for you" that we should take away from these food documentaries. It's that we really just don't quite know what's going on. I suspect that in some number of years we'll look back at these early years of nutrition education (yeah, we've been trying for a couple hundred years) as the dark ages, like when they thought leaches were a good idea.

Here's a snip from the movie, if you want a small taste, that shows a bit about why we get fat. A lot of the really good bits of the movie are on the related videos, if you don't want to spin the flick for yourself.