Once you do it it becomes incredibly easy. But I'm still able to cook from scratch for my family. I certainly know what it's like to be busy. 'And by the way, none of those things are true.'Īdded Reisman: 'I'm a working mom. 'We're now going on a fourth decade of marketing telling us that cooking is hard. Yet cooking meals with whole grains, fruits, vegetables and lean meats ensures children get the nutrients they need while eliminating unhealthy ingredients. All these things are sugar bombs.'įamilies are eating largely processed food or dining on takeout which contain high levels of sugar, fat and salt. Or cereal which is marketed as healthy, fibre added. 'You're eating a lot of ice cream or you're having doughnuts for breakfast, you know 'OK, I'm eating bad stuff.' But you don't necessarily know it when you're eating yogurt, which is marketed as a healthy breakfast. 'That's the other thing that's not fair about this issue,' David said. Percentage for the daily recommended intake of sugar is not portrayed on most nutrition labels (CBC) On nutrition labels, a percentage for the daily recommendation is not given for sugar. I think that's the power of Stephanie's film is that it is a story that she's telling us that makes us aware of how much we are surrounded by things that are actually not good for us.' Daily sugar allowance not on labelsĪdded sugar can have many guises, including molasses, sucrose, fructose, glucose, anhydrous dextrose, malt syrup and honey. 'You become aware and with that awareness you just take a couple of steps and a couple of steps. 'It's not like people have to go from not knowing anything to suddenly becoming these extreme food people,' said Reisman. Added sugar is estimated to account for about half of the total sugars intake or 51 to 53 grams per day (65 millilitres or 13 teaspoon), about 11 per cent of total daily calories. Sugar calories made up 21.4 per cent of the average Canadian's total calorie intake. The most recent Canadian data, from the 2004 Canadian Consumer Health Survey, shows that on average Canadians consumed 110 grams of total sugar a day that year - the equivalent of 130 millilitres (26 teaspoons) - which includes sugars added to foods as well as naturally occurring sugars in fruits, vegetables and milk products. Sure, sugar is sweet - but there are a few other things you should know about the substance. Sugar is addictive - a study showed that of 43 cocaine-addicted rats given the choice between cocaine and sugar water over 15 days, 40 of the creatures opted for the sweet stuff. Children have more exposure to foods containing sugar, fat and sodium through advertising, including online, and in their school cafeterias than ever before. Eighty per cent of the 600,000 food products sold in the U.S. Despite fitness club memberships more than doubling across the U.S. We got really lucky because we had some amazing children that really personified the underlying problems, the marketing and the policy issues.'Ĭonsider these facts from the film: from 1977 to 2000 it's estimated Americans have doubled their intake of sugar. We give them video cameras and ask them to document their daily life. 'At one point we're following 10 different families. 'We found them in various places, in church groups, through schools, doctors' offices,' Soecthig said. Two teaspoons of ketchup contain two teaspoons of sugar. Soecthig followed several families for more than two years and includes some heart-wrenching footage in which obese children document their uphill battle with the bulge. 'Katie Couric has been following the issue of diet, exercise and obesity for 30 years in different ways and notwithstanding all the news of this over so many years in fact Americans were getting fatter and she thought it would be interesting to excavate this problem and really understand what is going on,' said Reisman ahead of a screening at Toronto's recent Hot Docs Festival. Laurie David, who won an Oscar for producing An Inconvenient Truth, Indigo CEO Heather Reisman and Regina Scully ( Miss.Representation) are executive producers of Fed Up, which opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on Friday. The principal culprit is sugar, they say, which is added to many products, including ketchup, pasta sauce, salad dressing, breakfast cereals, juice and energy drinks, baked goods, yogurt and even baby formula. Fed Up documentary outlines how sugar is added in significant quantities to many foods we don't suspect including pastas, yogurt, salad dressing, baked goods and even baby formula (CBC)

The sugar story documentary