Argh. There is an important message here, but it's obscured behind a horrifically one-sided approach, a lack of credibility from interviewees, and blatant, unacknowledged hypocrisy.
Many of the initial messages Hungry for Change tries to convey are not particularly new: sedentary lifestyles combined with excessive carbohydrate are making people fat. Or that companies shamelessly market their food/drink products to dubiously imply all kinds of happier outcomes for customers (one favourite of mine, not mentioned in this documentary, is certain products being helpful in losing weight "as part of a calorie-controlled diet." Surely that's true for pretty much anything!). I doubt many would dispute that this has happened. Unfortunately it's not long before it starts to leave such safe ground and make unsubstantiated generalisations about all kinds of things.
Things like food companies deliberately making their foods addictive in order to sell more. Is this backed by scientific research? Is it only in the US? Does it apply to some or all foods? It's not clear.
Things like 'sugar is as addictive as cocaine'. Really? I mean, I'm open to believing that, if there's clear scientific evidence presented. But none is presented.
Or like the need to 'detox' one's body, which is where my patience really started to be tested, and prompt me to head to IMDb to share my displeasure. Because, the simple truth is that there is no scientific evidence for 'detoxing'. Seriously. Search for 'Ben Goldacre detox' on YouTube. Who's Ben Goldacre? He's a British (medical) doctor who has fought a long war against 'bad science' with a newspaper column and website of the same name. He's also an author: his debut non-fiction book 'Bad Pharma' is a passionate expose about what he sees as the lack of honesty from and undue influence by the pharmaceutical industry when trying to sell their drugs. His book runs to 400 pages, perhaps 200-300 pages of which is dedicated to painstaking description of the scientific method, how research failings can distort results and why drug trials by pharma companies often fall short of an acceptable standard. Reading it can be hard going at times, but one can understand why he sought to be so methodical in his approach: he was after all risking his professional reputation by taking a stand against big companies influential in his field. Consequently he wanted to ensure his defence was watertight (and doubtless litigation-tight too).
Hungry for Change however appears to have no such concerns in the projection of its message. The viewer is not taken through the subject's history or a process to help them understand the subject, like proper documentaries such as Inside Job would. Instead, the viewer is simply told 'facts' by 'experts' and expected to believe them. Given how many scientific studies have been conducted in this field, that is hugely irresponsible.
Who are these 'experts'? Senior scientists from Government or international organisations (say the World Health Organisation)? Er no. Try 'best-selling authors', people declared to be 'experts' (but who have no Wikipedia pages, suggesting they've hardly been breaking waves in their fields), or, ooh, people with Masters degrees (so what they say MUST be the truth and should be accepted without question). As John McEnroe would say: you cannot be serious.
Indeed, there's a yet more questionable aspect to many of the pundits on the programme. Many of them have come up with new weight- losing diets. Meaning, surely, that there's a risk many viewers looking for the answer to their weight-loss goals will take the 'expertise' of these pundits at face value and try the diets espoused by said pundits, to the financial benefit of the pundits. Doesn't that mean Hungry for Change is itself engaging in the very marketing it so despises? This is accentuated by a more minor, but still noticeable act: the shining of bright lights by the camera crew into the faces of the diet-pushing pundits, a commonly-used trick to make the subject appear younger/healthier (and thus those diets they're selling all the more successful). Outrageous.
This is a shockingly poor feature that does a disservice to the term 'documentary'. I'm not a fan of absolutes, but in this case it's truly merited. 'Hungry for Change' is without doubt the worst 'documentary' I've ever seen. 1/10 it is.
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