MovieChat Forums > That Sugar Film (2015) Discussion > Everything I hate in a documentary film.

Everything I hate in a documentary film.


This film is alarmist, sensationalist, and message driven, without being terribly factual or educational. I'm only 15 minutes in, and already several inaccurate or misleading claims have been made. The interviewees all seem to be incredibly biased, and premeditated in their conclusions. It has a conspiracy vibe, which is almost always a bad sign. I'm going to finish watching it, but I already hate it.

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I agree, even though I'm a person who does feel a lot better without sugar, and I've known that for years. For example, I never really truly understood the people who enjoy cake often, except for the "forbidden" rush of it. The first bite was good for me, but then afterwards my body starts to feel slightly nauseous and then quickly drained of energy and loss of focus, and it'd be that way for a long time. So for me, I've been aware of it since I was quite young, and I know that it doesn't feel like that for most people I know.

But I thought the conspiracy angle was just due to a different target audience than myself. Something about feeling like you're fighting for justice, and all that stuff. And to make it important enough for people to want to engage.
I do agree that it's absolutely biased though, and obviously they'd need far more hard evidence to ever suggest that there'd be a true conspiracy going on. And most of all, I just don't think it's very important whether there is a conspiracy in the first place. Because the issue seems to be solvable almost purely by having informed consumers.

For me, there was also several topics that wasn't covered enough. After we saw the initial discovery of how he developed fatty liver fast, it took a big downturn on the information department. After establishing the case that sugar was way worse than healthy fats, I would have seen it fitting to start checking that hypothesis for holes. The only criticism I recall included in the film, was a short interview where a scientist just states his arguments, and then we hear they're sponsored by Coca Cola, and then we don't really look into his arguments any further (if I recall correctly).

And then it spends a long time on things that had no informational purpose, we don't even hear how much he exercise (just that he exercises, and evenly throughout the experiment, I think), and I'm not even sure if we hear how his metabolism has been in general throughout his life (i.e. how genetics can play a role).
Not to mention that he's only one case. I thought it'd be fitting to include some other (voluntary) people, who tested this hypothesis of at least the going-off-sugar part, and see if they get the same results (beside the obvious success stories he speaks of, where the small communities developed diabetes because of extreme diet change etc.) - and also whether some people get negative results.

One negative hypothesis I thought of, was a tangent on his emphasis on how sugar substitutes for happiness. So my thinking was that the outcome of his idea, could be that we'd see a lot more depressed people. Because it struck me as arrogant that his relatively luxury life (a healthy relationship to a beautiful wife, a kid on the way, at least a middle class income, an overall life structure and an education that allows him to pursue his dreams and tend his duties and still feel good) isn't something they control for.
I couldn't help but get the thought that the process might work a lot differently for a depressed, pessimistic and/or misanthropic guy, living in poverty, but still attending work, and not touching drugs etc. Getting more energy and focus would not necessarily make his/her life better. I can even imagine that it could become worse.

And so on. There were many possibilities, but they chose spending the last half of the movie hammering in a point, that I felt was already covered well quite early.

I think it's a shame, because I think he had the opportunity to make the topic more mainstream, and with an informed angle. Before this, it seemed to me that only "health freaks" were interested in this (and probably only a few curious minds accidentally stumbling upon it, like myself). And many people think they're nutty anyway, so why would you care investigating that sugar was even worse than you heard in school? You wouldn't, unless you found the topic interesting, and the documentary format interesting. At least, that's my experience.

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Very well written and thoughtful reply. I agree completely.

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"For example, I never really truly understood the people who enjoy cake often, except for the "forbidden" rush of it."


There is no "rush." Have three espressos and then you will feel a rush. Your heart rate goes up, your hands may start shaking. That's a rush.

Glucose in the blood does not care whether it came from sugar or refined white flour. Sugar is carbohydrate and so is the flour in the cake. There is nothing particularly special about sugar when you consider the carbohydrates. It might take a slightly bigger slice of cake to achieve the same rise in blood sugar level if you are eating sugar-free cake, but the end result is exactly the same physiologically. Sugar is not toxic, unless you consider a potato toxic. Sugar, like any other carbohydrate, spikes your blood sugar level which demands the production of insulin by your pancreas. If you do this too often you may eventually develop diabetes, the type where your pancreas just gets tired of producing so much insulin all the time, or your body develops a resistance to the desired chemical effects of insulin because it is being exposed to too high levels of it too often. And once your body cannot effectively clear your blood of all these glucose spikes, your are in trouble and can develop chronic diabetes. This can all happen without ever eating any sugar because carbohydrates (like refined flour, potatoes, and so on) turns into glucose pretty quickly in your bloodstream. It may be slightly quicker to use refined white sugar, but once that sugar is metabolized into your blood, the glucose that it produces is no different from the sugar that comes from a generous helping of french fries. It is exactly the same thing.

So, if you have convinced yourself that sugar is toxic, then bread, potatoes, white rice, pasta, and pastry are also JUST AS toxic to you, because they have exactly the same result on your blood sugar levels.

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So are you saying that there's no such thing as a "forbidden fruit" or are you arguing semantics about it not being a "rush"? You do realize that the "forbidden fruit" is a psychological reaction that differs depending on how each individual view things, right?

I didn't mention the word "toxic" anywhere, so I don't know what you think I'm saying. I don't have diabetes by the way, I got that tested, if that's what you're trying to argue about.

I can try discuss the science of it all, if that's what you're trying to do, but I'm a bit rusty in nutritional science, so it'll probably not go very far.

To my knowledge, it's a controversial topic, even among the scientists (biochemistry, cell biology etc.). That's why I tried to argue that this topic could be interesting for a documentary to dive into - because there's high disagreement about specific details and I haven't heard of anyone trying to truly bring together all the empirical knowledge of sciences related to nutritional science, to find out what we really know and what we don't.

Obviously sugar (or any carbohydrate) isn't "toxic" since the definition of toxic is about extremely dangerous things that we can only tolerate very small doses of. And since presumably every human being have eaten and digested a big portion of carbohydrates and lived long after that, the conclusion is of course obvious.

My anecdote about cake (and very sweet things in general) is not anywhere near the ballpark of "toxic". It's closer to eating food that is on the verge of going bad. It gives me a slight nausea (feeling like I could throw up if I eat a lot more), it makes my stomach feel harder and more sensitive to what I eat afterwards, and it makes me feel more sluggish. Maybe it's an individual thing. And quite plausibly it's partially a mental thing. But the behavioral result still stands. Obviously I can't say anything concrete about the nutritional results, since I haven't tested it in any scientific way.

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Sorry, I thought you meant "rush" in the physical sense. Many people believe in what they call a "sugar rush," which is complete nonsense when you consider the actual evidence. My bad, as they say.

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Alright, well then that's probably also partially my fault, since English is my secondary language and I could thus be using the word in a wrong way. It wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong about the commonly attributed meaning of specific words. But of course, that's how it is when you only ever speak the language when on vacation or speaking with foreigners.

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It is kind of a rush in a physical sense, for the internal organs. Our digestive system isn't all that efficient. We tend to defecate about once a day. In a perfect world our system should digest just what it needs and defecate the rest. Some people tend to eat all they want and stay relatively healthy, we say these people have a "fast metabolism". It really should be the other way around - these people have a slow metabolism where the nutrients aren't digested very fast and tend to just pass through. A few huge meals in a row just means more time on the toilet.

We can do a good job if we eat right, but when we introduce things like sugar and powdered wheat into the system our digestive system processes these foods with no problem at all, to the point of overload. Our body can process liquid faster than solids, because the acids break down small things faster than big things that will pass through unused. Pour a spoon full of sugar into a glass of water at 98.6 degrees and stir, it melts pretty fast and will quickly overload the system when we are the glass. The same thing with powdered wheat, we use this to our advantage when we mix flour and warm water to use as a thickener - it'll turn to a thin paste very easily. Rice and corn are also starches, but we normally don't eat them in powdered form, so our system just passes them through before the acid can break them down to liquid.

Sugar is like alcohol, a beer or glass of wine a day can be processed with no problem; however, alcohol is addictive for many people and one beer can turn into a 12 pack - it's the same for a lot of things, like nicotine and sugar.

Decades ago, during the depression, many catch phrases were used to help a starving nation get more from the little food available in some areas. Sayings like, "clean your plate", "chew your food", "don't ruin your appetite for dinner", (and the starving children in China), were used to make a little food go a long way. We don't have a lack of food today, but are still in anti-starvation mode. It makes us fat and unhealthy. How do we counter this? Eat more. Eat every few hours whether hungry or not. Don't chew as much. Don't eat things we can easily process. Our bodies will self regulate again. We will never be hungry. We will be able to gauge the food intake our bodies need by how much we defecate in the toilet, not by the bathroom scale or counting calories. Eat as much as you want and still lose weight, but never go more than a couple hours without eating, and don't consider sugar or starch a meal - have some bacon.

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Umm. Obviously you never watched the film, which explains exactly how this works.

To keep it short:
Glucose = fuel = good
Fructose = evolutionary rare Sweetness = bad

Sugar = 50% Glucose and 50% Fructose

Your liver can deal with Glucose fine, but not with Fructose (which it binds to fat.) Insulin prevents the fat from being used for energy. Until about 200 years ago, Fructose was relatively rare in our diets. Glucose wasn't.

I really wish people would at least watch the movie they are commenting on before sounding off.

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Why is it people like to sound off without watching a film properly. As was mentioned the glucose in sugar isn't the problem but fructose is. Who said anything about toxic. The list of foods you list as just as responsible are ludicrous. There are thousands of different food products with sugar in them, whereas bread is just well bread. Also eating those items will make you feel full at some point, something a lot of sugar products don't as was also mentioned in the film. Dear God anybody would think you worked for the sugar industry.


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Spot on. You cant "give up sugar", the body has this wonderful thing called gluconeogenesis. I'm sick to death of uneducated celebrities dishing out advice on complex biological and physiological processes.

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Of course u can give up sugar. Just eat fruits and vegetables as man has for millennium rather turbo charged foods which are synthetic concoctions

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Everything you eat is converted into sugar by your body.

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This is not correct.

Glucose is extracted from the food you eat. Sugar is not glucose, but it contains glucose along with a load of fructose.

We can extract glucose from a range of foods (like pasta, cheese, bread, apples) but we don't experience much natural fructose. It's what gives the sweet taste to things. Pasta and cheese aren't naturally sweet, because they don't contain fructose.

Processed sugar is roughly 50/50 glucose and fructose.

The problem is not the glucose, which you'd understand if you bothered to watch the film.

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You sir are an idiot!! This is completely wrong. Nutrients from food are used as building blocks for thousands of other chemicals in the body. The body has the ability to make GLUCOSE not sugar, whenever energy is required. In fact as the doco pointed out correctly, it spends a hell of a lot of time trying to get rid of sugar.

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When 80% of food in conventional groceries are sugar ladened. There's a problem.

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Seriously, this was a poorly made film. Some of the message was probably true but they didn't back it with many facts, mostly exaggerated claims. The way that the main guy acts like sugar is making him crazy and hyper is just ridiculous. Then they act like it causes mental health problems, and compare it to things like cocaine. One part that really proved all of this was a woman near the end that said she wouldn't do a major anti-sugar study because the experiment/funding/research would take five whole years instead the documentary relies on unproven biased non-fact based opinions. Don't get me wrong the diet that the average person is not healthy and we really need some changes in our society but this documentary didn't have enlightenment on hardly anything.

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"Then they act like it causes mental health problems, and compare it to things like cocaine."

How about comparing it to cocaine AND heroin? And shown it to be more addictive than both? Here's just three peer-reviewed scientific studies which have shown exactly that, published in the U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (so no, not some crap pulled from Wikipedia):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17668074

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24602027

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23719144

There's a lot of money behind the sugar industry, so it's no small wonder you hear little about the potentially harmful effects of refined sugar, especially considering how invasive it's become in nearly everything we consume. And why, when you do, you just think those people are somehow "whack jobs" even though what they're trying to get across to you is the same stuff that's right there in those National Institutes of Health studies, only not so full of scientific jargon...

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Well this is easy one just cut out foods with allot of sugars in them and see how you look and feel.

I did this without even realizing it. My girlfriend is super healthy , drinks only water, except the occasional glass of wine or a beer. Eats allot like the guy does normally she looks fantastic and has tons of energy.

So I started eating more like her and before I even realized it, I lost weight, felt WAY better. Felt way more energetic in all aspects of my life. Work, social life, sex life all of it improved.
Things that used get me ticked off, I don't even notice happening anymore.

So maybe you guys don't like the way the documentary was presented or whatever but the message is true.

If the sugar is naturally in the food, no big deal, but why add more?

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Lol, you liar!🤣🤣🤣

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