“There are 600,000 food items in America. Eighty percent of them have added sugar,” according to the new film Fed Up, which was screened at Harvard School of Public Health on April 23, 2014 in Kresge G3. The exclusive advanced screening event was cohosted by Let’s Talk About Food, an organization dedicated to changing the way we eat, talk and think about food, and ChopChop The Fun Cooking Magazine for Families. The new documentary film is directed by Stephanie Soechtig (Tapped) and produced by Katie Couric and Laurie David, (producer of Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth). One of the most talked about films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Fed Up is about “how everything we thought we knew about food and exercise was dead wrong,” according to the producers. The film opens nationally on May 9.
David Ludwig, professor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, had a role in the film. Referring to the food industry, Ludwig said in the film, “To place private profit above public health is a systematic, political failure.”
Members of HSPH’s Department of Nutrition were among those on hand for the screening and to hear the panel discussion. Panelists included Laurie David, Sally Sampson, founder and president of ChopChopKids, and Eric Rimm, associate professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition at HSPH. Louisa Kasdon, founder and CEO of Let’s Talk About Food, moderated the panel.
According to the Boston Globe, David “actually expressed optimism about the nation’s myriad food-related ills because of ‘the fact that there’s this terrible problem and the solution is in everyone’s kitchen.’”
Read Boston Globe article: Laurie David drops by Harvard to screen ‘Fed Up’