Review of Fat Head (2009) by Ben G — 09 Dec 2012

This is "Good Calories, Bad Calories: The Movie" in the form of a debunking of "Super Size Me." I think this film's conclusions may well be largely correct, but one could be forgiven for not finding this presentation very convincing. It spends too much time knocking down strawmen for comedic effect, sometimes in such a way that it undercuts its own point for any viewer who knows the difference between anecdotes and statistics.

Several of these happen right at the start of the film (does any fast food critic literally believe that McDonalds is physically forcing people to eat Big Macs?) which sets up the expectation that the rest of the film will be similarly slipshod. It gets better, though, and is at its strongest when it educates about nutrition-advocacy history and the science of obesity and heart disease. But even that material is still sprinkled with too many juvenile cheap shots to earn a strong recommendation.