Considering that your liver converts excess carbohydrates in your diet into fat, I fail to see the logic of this drug.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the thesis of the documentary will actually be “Fat people have too much fat in their diets”

Not only would it be more likely to sell as a documentary, it actually is the case for a lot of people. There’s a rather large number of people who are (usually) moderately overweight due not to eating a lot, but to eating too much fatty crap.

Documentaries can also support a prevailing point of view., heck, they can even advance it.

The hint is in the name: they are supposed to document the reality around us, not necessarily to challenge it (but of course, challenging the status quo is a way of documenting the current state of affairs).

And then it went away.

How? My kids started school.

You see, when my kids started school, my wife started packing a lunch for them, and for me too. For lunch I mostly have leftovers from diner the night before (real foods, just normal stuff) and some fruit. Before that I was eating junk almost every lunch.

That one simple change (and the fact that we moved into town, so I started walking a little more) made the fat go away.

No dieting. No counting anything. No overt exercise (besides things like walking down to the coffee shop for my morning whole-milk infused fru-fru coffee).

I agree with almost all the posters here: if you want to be healthy, eat whatever you want, provided its good, real food (and not too much).

And that would make a great documentary. Explode the whole eating mythos that we labor under. Diet this, diet that, obsession… It’s all for naught, and it’s doing many people great harm.

How about a documentary about Health at Every Size (HAES)? How about a documentary about adipose tissue and why we need it and it’s historical social and economic impact? Cause that would actually be pretty interesting.

Hunger tends to be why people think calories don’t matter. They’ll eat a low calorie meal, then be hungry and eat more the next meal. Or become so lethargic that they don’t use nearly as many calories. Or some people think calories don’t matter because they suck at counting, especially with snacks and portion size.

Nutritionally, cutting out any macronutrient is bad. Eating fat isn’t, in fact, there are actually essential fatty acids. What’s bad about fatty foods is that fat has 9 calories per gram, compared to carbohydrates with 4, and proteins with a net of 4. So fatty foods are often high in calories, and fats and oils tend to be rather void of other nutrients, and thus it’s probably a good idea to limit them unless you need them (e.g. endurance athlete).

What is it like? Well, it does make you stick to a healthy low fat diet, because if you don’t you’ll be dreadfully sick. For example, I went out for lunch with some co-workers, ordered something that should have been a good choice but apparently wasn’t, and spent the whole afternoon in the bathroom. (All spare you all from the details).

The other, often glossed over feature of Alli is while in double blind studies it was shown to help people loose more weight then by diet alone, it wasn’t that much extra weight. Most of the weight loss still comes from people eating healthy food and getting more exercise.

All that said if GlaxoSmithKline wants to take some of the money they’ve made off Alli and spend it on a documentary about weight problems I don’t see a problem with that. But I’m not really sure how they could expect more people to take Alli unless they control the editorial content.

It’s really the whole ‘effort’ thing that stops people from staying thin. ‘Effort’ is hard, right?

I challenge someone to go up to an amputee and say “Hey! You’ve only got one leg! You must have been drunk driving to get like that!”

Same thing.

Eat to live, don’t live to eat. If you’re living to eat, it’s time for a new hobby.

That’s an oversimplification. Fat, carbs and protein, for instance, have quite different relationships to insulin production, which is a vital step in depositing fat.

The one good thing about the ethanol-from-corn hype (as opposed to ethanol from non-food stocks) is that it has taken lots of corn sugar off the market, with the result that some businesses are quietly switching back to genuine sucrose… though many of them are not changing their product labels, which already allow either, because they aren’t sure how long this shift will last.

American Coke is closer to Original Coke now than it has been in quite some time; I used to have to go to Canada to stock up.

I would say that judging by how many obese Americans there are, the problem IS still being mostly ignored. If yet another documentary about fat people needs to be made in order to help us understand what exactly causes a body to gain so much unhealthy weight, then it needs to me made. Because it’s not the problem of some alien species of fat people, it’s everybody’s problem. This is relevant even if you’re skinny, because you’re still at risk, with the kind of food that is popular and available today, and the lazy routines most people accept as normal.

Hey, if Kleiner Perkins and Generation Investment Management (Al Gore’s corporate partners) can do it, why not Glaxo??