Fat Head

The comedian Tom Naughton sets out to answer Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me. For twenty-eight days he eats fast food while keeping carbohydrate under a hundred grams a day, and he loses weight. Then he comes to his real claim: that heart disease is driven by inflammation rather than by saturated fat, and that the story of an obesity epidemic is overstated. Doctors who hold that view speak in the film. Naughton shot the documentary himself; a hundred and four minutes. The argument it makes found no purchase in medicine and was not taken up in scientific journals. Critics say the film brushes past the controlled trials showing that saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol. Naughton's own experiment also limited calories, and the film never separates out which variable the weight loss came from.