With its director-protagonist Damon Garneau embarking on an experiment to see what a typically high-sugar Western diet does to his at-first healthy body, this documentary is a straight-up rehash of Morgan Spurlock’s adventure in junk food, Super Size Me, but filmed in Australia as well as the US.
As a public service message, it does a perfectly serviceable job of explaining how sugar, even “good sugars” such as fructose, is bad for you in every way – medically, psychologically and even culturally – via peppy visual effects and animation, some of it explained by celebrities such as Hugh Jackman and Stephen Fry.
Schools could easily use it as a teaching tool for topic work on nutrition and other subjects, and a prolonged dentistry sequence would terrify anyone into brushing regularly and swearing off Mountain Dew. But there’s also something annoyingly glib and oversimplified about the argument, and Garneau with his Smeg fridge and smug affect grows more irksome over the course. Moreover, engagement with issues around poverty, capitalism and public policy kicks in a bit too late.
