Film Takes Closer Look at Food Policy
Why is America so obese? While eating too much and not exercising enough are the obvious answers, there appears to be another elephant in the room.
Big Fat Lie, an upcoming documentary directed and produced by Idahoan Jennifer Isenhart, argues that U.S. federal agencies got away with making health and dietary recommendations to the American public without any evidentiary support or basis in fact.
More specifically, since the 1960s, the American Heart Association has said saturated fat is detrimental to cardiovascular health—yet the claim (a.k.a. the big fat lie) is not proven.
“It’s more than ‘saturated fat isn’t bad,’” according to Isenhart. “We were led to believe that saturated fats raised cholesterol levels, but in interviewing experts, the science really isn’t there.”
Isenhart argues in her new film—narrated by Katie Couric collaborator Mark Hyman, MD—that American physiologist Ancel Keys cherry-picked data to back his erroneous observational studies showing that saturated fat consumption leads to heart disease. According to interviewees featured in BigFat Lie, dietary caps on saturated fat aren’t supported by any real evidence, and no other policy has caused as much harm to the American public.
“Eating fat keeps you sated, and the unintended consequence of removing it is foods lose their flavor,” Isenhart said. “Americans were getting about 40% of their diet from fat, which got replaced with carbohydrates and sugar.”
The former KTVB news producer was spurred to create the documentary after taking a five-week sugar detox program in Boise called Restart. The course, during which Isenhart eliminated sugar and grains from her diet (and ate a good deal more fat), dispelled some of the food-related myths with which she was raised.
“I grew up in the era of low-fat and was told you should get it out of your diet,” she said. “But that kicked off a massive obesity epidemic in our country—we started eating more calories, creating a vicious cycle.”
After doing some additional research on her own, Isenhart read The Big Fat Surprise, a 2014 book chronicling the history of dietary guidelines in New York City and written by investigative journalist Nina Teicholz. Isenhart was so profoundly affected by the book that “I felt like I had to do a documentary on it,” she said.
The filmmaker joined forces with Teicholz last year and, in August started shooting Big Fat Lie, which is still in the works. She discovered that the AHA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommended that Americans lower their fat consumption to lower than 10% of their diet.
“But you have to eat something, and you have to get your calories from somewhere,” Isenhart said. “Foods lost their flavor, and that launched what some people called ‘The SnackWell’s Era’ of low-fat cookies and other foods.”
She added: “Dietary guidelines affect everything. A lot of people say they don’t matter, but they actually affect everything from food stamps to military lunches to school lunches, all the way down the board to what the [Centers for Disease Control] recommends for Type 2 diabetics.”
While other films have touched on U.S. dietary guidelines and their impact on obesity rates, “the more I looked around, I realized this hadn’t been examined in comprehensive documentary form,” according to Isenhart.
She is creating her film in conjunction with Wide Eye Productions, a video production and post-production company with facilities in Boise and Seattle. Isenhart serves as a principal at the company, winner of multiple regional Emmy Awards.
As of early January, the team still had about 75% of filming to do on Big Fat Lie, followed by post-production. They hope to finish filming in June, complete a first cut in August and submit the movie to the Sundance Film Festival, where it could pick up even more steam.
Isenhart’s film has a national scope, and if her aspirations are realized it could help solve the diabetes epidemic ravaging the U.S. She notes that one in two Americans has diabetes or pre-diabetes, while 71% of people ages 17 to 24 wouldn’t qualify for the U.S. Army because they would be deemed too obese to serve.
“If we don’t figure this out, we’re toast as a nation,” Isenhart said.
