By filmmakers James Colquhoun and Laurentine Ten Bosch
Reviewed by Karen Henry
Hungry for Change is an intricate film with a simple message: The best way to lose weight and maintain vital health is through the juicing of fruits and vegetables. Produced in 2012, the 90-minute documentary features the tag line, “Your health is in your hands.” Weaving story, dramatic testimonials of well-known successful dieters, medical science, and statistics; the essential message of the movie is: Diets don’t work; what we need is lifestyle change.
“Diets don’t work; they have failure built right into them.”
Australian filmmakers James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch, who currently live in Santa Monica, made Food Matters: Let Thy Food by Thy Medicine in 2008 to reveal how a poor diet coupled with a pill-popping dependency serves the longevity of big business — but not you. With Hungry for Change, they focused more on the need to change diet along with a person’s approach to stress and food.
As they say in Hungry for Change, “Marketing essentially lies to you, telling you’re going to be sexy and popular and cool, but in reality you’re going to be obese and miserable and sick.” For example, the food additive aspartame in diet colas has been shown in research studies to cause or mimic multiple neurological diseases. Flavor subsitutes are designed to build in addiction to the taste. Just as tobacco companies have included additives to cigarettes to increase the addictive power of nicotine, food companies are adding addictive chemicals to processed foods, to ensure they have customers for life.
One example is MSG, which induces increased fat in mice, is found in 80 percent of modern-day foods under many names. Another problem are the ingredients that are concentrated isolates (high fructose corn syrup, white sugar, table salt, white flour) are compared here to cocaine, which is an isolated derivative from cocoa leaves. Since 1940, 75,000 synthetic chemicals have been invented. Most of these chemicals are stored in fat tissue in the body; but by burning fat through exercise, the toxins remain.
The film points out that our society is in a state of being “overfed, yet starving to death.” Sugars make you fat, not fats.
Jamie Oliver makes a dramatic appearance on a TED talk replayed in the movie where he has a wheelbarrow full of sugar which represents the amount of sugar a child would receive just from drinking milk during five years of elementary school. Who knew sugar has been added to school milk cartons to enhance the milk flavor?
Marking is misleading as fat-free foods are generally full of sugars, which actually lead to the body depositing greater stores of fat. Healthy fats, such as those found in avocado, flax seed, chia seed, and oils in deep water fish like salmon, are actually essential.
The basic premise here is that dieting violates our body’s natural adaptations—and diets consisting of man-made foods are not conducive to good health. Our supermarket diet no longer resembles any natural diet. We would never feed animals in the zoo the food available in our grocery stores, but that’s what Americans are being sold.
To lose weight successfully, the film suggests add more whole plant foods with their dense nutrient complexes. Even better, choose locally grown. As you make shifts, you will inevitably feel so much better that you will continue in that direction.
Juicing is the ultimate fast food. In merely 15 minutes, the nutrition from freshly pressed juices is available. In contrast, the nutrients in most meals are available four to 16 hours later. Want to know some specific recommendations for the healthiest foods? The film offers some suggestions. And, a key conclusion is stress reduction is essential. “Obesity is not the problem, it’s the solution,” the solution from the body’s perspective—it’s the body’s reaction to the high stress world of non-natural inputs we ingest every day. We have another option and it’s found in food—real food.
The filmmakers choose to release the film with a 10-day free online availability, a first for a documentary film premiere. They also accompanied the film with a reference book, Hungry for Change: Ditch the Diets, Conquer the Cravings, and Eat Your Way to Lifelong Health. The film has obviously struck a chord, as it has 158,000 followers on Facebook.
Karen Henry is an Associate Editor at LA YOGA who volunteers in a variety of capacities for nonprofit organizations and artists around Los Angeles. She practices yoga as a counterbalance to her daily impact sports and is a mother of four grown children who also practice yoga . Now, she’s working on teaching yoga and joy of life to the grandkids!