Battles against bulge and antibiotics
With documentaries like "Food, Inc." and "Fed Up" having made the rounds in recent years, it's tempting to think that the last word has been uttered on how Americans' food choices - conditioned by corporate greed and shameful political inertia - have become a public health disaster.
But before you tune out, turn away and reach for that next Chicken McNugget and extra-large Coke, there are a couple of films arriving on demand that shed new, unsettling light on how the economics of food is making us fatter, unhealthier and more vulnerable to sudden early death.
"Bite Size," by Corbin Billings, in many ways takes up where last year's "Fed Up" left off, profiling four teenagers as they battle obesity in Mississippi, Florida and California. While one attends a weight-loss boarding school (paid for by her parents cashing out their retirement funds), another joins a YMCA training program in exercise and nutrition. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, another youth joins the school football team his father played on, while another, under the tutelage of a caring mentor, signs up with a group of overweight girls whose goal is to put on a dance show at the end of the term.
Not surprisingly, there are setbacks, small victories and no small amount of tears in "Bite Size," which focuses on the private efforts of kids and their counselors, coaches and parents without connecting their struggles to a food industry hooked on salt, high fructose corn syrup and other additives. Billings leaves it to viewers to contemplate how low-cost food has made obesity and diabetes overwhelming issues for poor communities, and how even middle-class families can't get systemic support for weaning their children off the sugar that permeates their lives, even when they try to eat sensibly. When one of the subjects sees a doctor about her constant, bottomless feelings of hunger, she's advised to eat bran muffins. It's not until her father takes to the Internet that he discovers how sugar addiction can be triggered even by healthy-seeming watermelon.
As heartbreaking as "Bite Size" is, it's even more depressing that, when it comes to the now-mandatory action steps it suggests during the end credits, most of the advice is personal rather than political. The lucid, superbly filmed "Resistance" is far more galvanizing, as it elucidates how the misuse of and overdependence on antibiotics by the medical and agricultural industries has resulted in drug-resistant bacteria that have become exponentially quicker and more lethal in recent years.
Directed by Michael Graziano, "Resistance" offers a lively primer in how antibiotics were discovered, and how they came to be seen as miracle drugs, having staved off injury-related infections during World War II and sexually transmitted diseases during Vietnam. Doctors, scientists and authors provide insightful expertise, but it's the terrifying stories of real-life encounters with such superbugs as MRSA that viewers won't be able to shake.
Graziano presents a persuasive case that the profligate use of antibiotics - especially as fattening agents in high-volume meat production - will soon culminate in a collective medical crisis of terrifying proportions.
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"Bite Size" (unrated, 80 minutes) will be available March 10 on Vimeo On Demand and www. bitesizemovie.com. On March 24 the film will be available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, VUDU and Movies On Demand. "Resistance" (unrated, 72 minutes) is available now on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video and DHX.