The attack on Morgan Spurlock is misguided, and Naughton’s counter-experiment proves nothing. Spurlock went on an extreme binge which everyone, including Spurlock, expected in advance to cause weight gain and other negative effects (“duh”), which he wanted to document on film. It was more of an exercise in “performance art” than in science, and meant to simply to provoke the viewer into the thinking a bit about the possible consequences of regularly ingesting the same kind of food over a lifetime.

Naughton, on the other hand, takes in an actual caloric deficit, with restricted carbs, and regular exercise, and then experiences a weight loss. How does Naughton’s experiment in any way “rebut” Spurlock’s? And, given the fact that Naughton goes on to argue that restricting carbs is more important than lowering calorie intake, his own experiment is useless to prove either strategy, since he cut intake of both calories AND carbs.

The film is poorly organized and produced, and is undermined at every turn by the injection of sophomoric humor. In a typically tedious sequence, the snarky Naughton asks people on the street if they have ever collapsed with a heart attack immediately after eating fettuccine alfredo. Tres dumb. Especially when you consider that a plate-full of pasta smothered in cream, butter, and cheese is a food that both low carb and low fat eaters would want to avoid eating often. In one of his failed attempts at humor (in a scene showing his own wife in bed), she asks if he is a moron, and in that moment she seems to speak on behalf of the viewer.

Worst of all is the ongoing anti-government Libertarian ideology that underscores Naughton’s narrative. He argues that anyone “with a functioning brain” can make proper food choices, but at the same time argues that the public has been deluged with mountains of false information and bad advice for decades. The film is littered with such logical inconsistencies. Naughton’s gratuitous political agenda shows up in some bizarre assertions, like when he argues that higher tendency toward obesity among the poor is merely the result of a predisposition among non-whites toward “thicker” bodies, and the assertion that court-mandated busing to achieve racial desegregation contributed to overweight school children. These theories simply detract from the credibility of the diet and health science he eventually discusses. Naughton is entitled to whatever political views he wishes, but injecting them into a documentary about nutrition and health does nothing to advance an essentially purely scientific subject.

At his blog and in interviews like the one above, Naughton comes off considerably better than in the amateurish film that he actually made. If you know anyone “with a functioning brain” that is still clinging to the conventional wisdom that you’d like to convert, showing them “Fat Head” may not be the best way to get them to become more open-minded, thanks to the many mis-guided and unhelpful aspects of the film.