Discussion Board

This is a 4 part series on obesity in America that airs May 14th and 15th.

You can find out more and watch the trailer here:

http://theweightofthenation.hbo.com/

You can also follow Weight of the Nation on Facebook.

There was a post about this a few days ago. I don't have HBO, but signed up for the screening kit, as suggested. I still haven't heard from HBO though.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29153&hilit=weight+of+the+nation

Sorry, I must have missed the other post about it.
Thanks for the link.

One of the doctors who appears in the series - I can't remember his name but he is the president or director of the NIH - appeared on The Colbert Report tonight. At the beginning he said we are eating too many calories then at the end he put the blame on sugar.

I heard that this series is to stream live for free. I assume it will stream from the website: theweightofthenation.hbo.com. I heard it on Fresh Air. There are a couple of news stories too.

(I haven't learned how to make a clickable link on here without the auto-feature:-)

I just watched/listened to Parts 1 and 2 and I thought I would post some comments:

What I did not like:

-they made it look like to be successful at losing weight you had to obsessively weigh your food and count every single calorie. A calorie is a calorie was a common theme and all you had to do was eat fewer calories and cut your portions.

-not a single word about vegetarian diets even though its common knowledge among health professionals (at least it should be ) that vegetarians are thinner.

-Sugar/soda was repeatedly mentioned but not a word about cheese, meat (though pizza and burgers were shown several times) or oil. As soon I saw that Dr Robert Lustig was a part of it I knew we were going to hear a lot about sugar and fructose.

-Some "expert" said that soda was the only food shown to correlate with obesity and I'm pretty sure that is not true. The research on that is mixed. However there was not a single word on all the research linking meat and animal protein to being overweight/obese.

-when they flashed "fad" diet books on the screen one was for a high carb diet. (Another was Dr Grahams 80 10 10.) Then they said that any diet that restricts something altogether is a "fad" and not sustainable, or something like that.

What I liked:

-I thought all the stuff about the Bogalusa heart study was interesting. I knew about that study from Dr F's books, Dr Attwood's book among others.

-I thought they gave a fair account of what can happen when you get weight loss surgery. The guy suffered from some serious side effects and was not well for 6 whole months. So they did not glorify it as the answer.

-The Atkins diet was mentioned many times by the overweight people featured as being a diet they tried but failed on.

-I was happy that none of Dr McDougall's books, Dr F's books, Engine 2 book or any other book I own was shown on screen as being a "fad."

A couple more things I wanted to add:

I also liked how they featured identical twins one with type 2 diabetes, one without. This drove home the point that lifestyle is more important than genetics for this illness.

And I liked how they showed how much you have to exercise to burn off the calories in a doughnut or a candy bar and talked about how most people do not realize how few calories they burn off while exercising. So they stressed that while exercise is important and beneficial, it alone is not the answer.

Thank you, Adrienne, for the synopsis of the program. I hope you will do it for the remaining parts, too.

What I know about computers you can put in your eye and not feel it so when my I got a message that firefox, which is what my son in law set my computer up with, does not support the movie, I discovered that it would not stream correctly so I guess I cannot view it.

Darn.

Didi

OK. I managed to watch it despite the constant stops. I was very disappointed in the solutions to overweight they portrayed. There was no mention that fat makes you fat. One doctor said a calorie is a calorie and it doesn't matter if it is fat, protein or carb. Yet they were pretty specific, a la Paula Dean, about cutting out sweet drinks. No mention that 300 calories of fat take up very little room in your stomach but you probably couldn't finish eating three hundred calories of a raw vegetable salad with lots of greens. So it seemed like the message from the professionals was--it is ok to eat fat and lots of "lean" protein.

At the end of the second film, two ladies who each lost about 100 pounds were, after a year or more on their diet, weighing, measuring, limiting portions and keeping journals and walking about 9 miles per day. They supported each other which is great but it is unlikely that many will go to the extreme of making each meal a science project.

So despite the hoopla and positive message that something has to be done, thus far the first two films did not give any solutions that a majority of overweight people are likely to find helpful. And the complications suffered by the judge who had bariatric surgery should have been enough to turn people to any diet rather than that surgery. Forks Over Knives was several times better and more informative and more practical.

Didi

didi I agree about your point about calories from fat vs calories from vegetables. I was disappointed they said a calorie from lettuce is like a calorie from a jellybean but completely failed to mention that it is MUCH easier to overeat jellybeans. It is too bad they did not discuss calorie density which would have been far more useful to viewers than showing people who were successful at losing weight by counting and measuring everything they ate.

At least the documentary didn't perpetuate the myth that carbs make you fat.

I just watched all 4 parts. Didi is right. Showing "Forks Over Knives" 4 times would have been much more useful.

I thought parts 3 and 4 were overly long and poorly edited. This whole thing could have been much shorter as there was a lot of repetition. I may be wrong but I don't think I heard the word "cheese" once in the 4 part series. Pizza was shown numerous times and food consumption graphs showed increases in cheese and meat but I did not hear the word cheese at all. I did miss some of part 3 so someone can correct me if I am wrong.

The most surprising point of the whole series came in the middle of part 4 where Dr Kelly Brownell Phd Director, Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, at Yale stood up and you could clearly see how fat he was!! This man was featured prominently throughout the entire series talking about obesity and he can't even manage his own weight. I am not saying that he shouldn't be included in this documentary but I am shocked they didn't edit out the few seconds he was filmed standing up. Why should people listen to an obesity expert who can't control his own weight?

If this is the first time you've seen ol' Kelly on this subject, he's been fat for years. He regularly appears on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. (They have a free video library if you're interested.)

The agenda of this series is to legislate health, to cut to the chase. I'm all for it. But we obviously don't have the systems in place to do that efficiently so it won't happen. We don't elect people who will stand up to the companies that are killing us. We don't collectively stand up to these companies--they know it. The concept of the "common good" is just about dead here in the US and we don't much mind, or else this doc would not be necessary.

I watched most of three of the four episodes and I intend to watch it all in its entirety. What I did see was mostly flat with too many "experts." And I kept having to pause and reverse to catch the names. There was a CNBC doc on the same subject, with the emphasis on healthcare, IIRC that was only an hour including commercials. And in that one they made sure to profile a man who died fairly shortly after his gastric bypass.

Clearly people don't know how to parent anymore if Kaenan, (or whatever the kid's name was--his last name was clearly WHINER, judging from his mom's oral contributions), who had been going to this exercise clinic/study thingy since he was 9, is the norm. His mother expressed that she was powerless to get the kid to change at one point. (It almost seemed like a joke stuck in for comic relief.) That's the job of the parents. It's not all the fault of commercials and food companies and the school lunch systems in each school.

This has all been hashed and rehashed and warmed over in one form or another for the last 15 years, at least, in various news stories, docs, etc--it's just getting worse is all.

I had never heard of this Kelly guy before. Here is a list of the names of all the experts in case you are interested.

http://theweightofthenation.hbo.com/experts

Yeah and I agree there wasn't really a lot of new info. although maybe some people were unaware that fruit juice was so loaded with sugar.

Airing FOK would have been so much more enlightening.