History Film / FatHead

!''Fat Head'' provides examples of:

* HollywoodHeartAttack: PlayedForLaughs. At one point, Tom consumes a 1450 calorie hamburger which the CSPI hyperbolically described as "heart attack in a bun". He records a log in the middle of the night, complaining of chest pain, except he feels great. Tom points out that if he actually suspected he had a heart attack, he would have immediately gone to the hospital, not set up a camera in his bedroom for RuleOfDrama like Spurlock.

* SpiritualAntithesis: ''Fat Head'' is made by Tom Naughton as a response to ''Film/SuperSizeMe'', and takes an opposite approach to Morgan Spurlock's [=McDonalds=] experiment while still attempting to replicate it. Spurlock deliberately goes after the unhealtheist items on the menu, force feeds himself until he throws up, and does not keep a food log; Naughton, reasoning that he has a functioning brain, restricts his carb intake, avoids sugary sodas, and publishes his food log for transparency. Their attitudes to the larger "obesity epidemic" are also polar opposites, with Spurlock openly accusing the fast food industry of being responsible and argues that consumers should boycot them until they go bankrupt, while Naughton takes a deep dive into the statistics and research used by health experts and lobby groups such as the CSPI (used as a source by Spurlock), claiming that they have an agenda and deliberately fudged the numbers. Basically, Spurlock takes a left-progressive, social activist approach, while Naughton is a libertarian, do-your-own-research and be responsible advocate.

* DanBrowned: ''Fat Head'' points out a lot of this in ''Super Size Me''. Among other things, ''Fat Head'' starts with the CaptainObvious conclusion of "eating five thousand calories a day and not exercising, regardless of what you ate, would make you gain weight." It also says that the experiment carried out within ''Super Size Me'' doesn't add up based on what host Morgan Spurlock says he ate.

* DocumentaryOfLies: ''Super Size Me'' is accused of fudging the truth and being manipulative. Tom starts by pointing out that eating more than 5,000 calories of [=McDonald's=] each day on Spurlock's rules is actually impossible, indicating that Spurlock either lied about his calorie intake or broke his own rules.

* CaffeineBulletTime: The "Fit for Life" diet says that you should eat proteins and carbohydrates at separate times, but consume only fruit and juice until noon. Tom ended up with a sugar rush that lasted two hours.

* VisualPun: On the cover, Tom's mouth is stuffed full of bologna. Calling something "bologna" is an informal way of saying that it is completely untrue, and the purpose of this documentary is to spell out how ''Film/SuperSizeMe'' approached demonstrating the unhealthiness of fast food was dishonest and misleading.

* VisualPun: On the cover, Tom's mouth is stuffed full of bologna.

* UnfortunateImplications:[[invoked]] Tom argues that Morgan Spurlock and those who agreed with him in ''Super Size Me'' came off as HolierThanThou at best, and outright racist at worst. Tom notes that in its quest to drive home how the American masses were {{Fat Idiot}}s, ''Super Size Me'' implied that low-income minorities that frequent fast food restaurants were inherently unintelligent people who don't know what's good for them and need unwanted guidance towards "better" lifestyles.

** [[UpToEleven Tom goes even older:]] he aligns the way he eats closer to a how pre-agricultural people ate because pre-agricultural people were actually surprisingly healthy. Indeed, even in agricultural times, people did not stray that far from the pre-agricultural diet until recently.

* ShoutOut: The documentary repeatedly plays the "Follow the money" clip from ''All The President's Men''.

* {{Retcon}}: CSPI once said that trans fats were good (and that animal fats were bad), forcing everyone to switch to trans fats. Once CSPI learned that trans fats were actually bad, CSPI insisted that they knew that trans fats were bad and forced everyone to ditch trans fats.

* ViolationOfCommonSense:
** In keeping his carbohydrates low, he orders burgers and sandwiches without the bun. That works.
** Turns out that switching to a low-fat, low-cholesterol, high-grain diet that was once entirely contrary to the way people ate millennia ago and even impossible without modern technology (vegetable oil did not have the technology required to be extracted from vegetables) is not good to our health.

* CriticalResearchFailure: [[invoked]]''Fat Head'' points out a lot of this in ''Super Size Me''. Among other things, ''Fat Head'' starts with the CaptainObvious conclusion of "eating five thousand calories a day and not exercising, regardless of what you ate, would make you gain weight." It also says that the experiment carried out within ''Super Size Me'' doesn't add up based on what host Morgan Spurlock says he ate.

* ChirpingCrickets: They sound with coyote howls when ''Fat Head'' shows how empty are the parking lot floors that are far from the mall entrances... or the non-automatic stairs that are inside the mall... [[RuleOfThree or emergency rooms which are surprisingly free of obese people choking on their own fat.]]

** Tom goes against the belief that fat people eat junk food because they genuinely don't know what's good or bad for them, a belief that many of the food activists and fast food critics seem to operate on. Tom also criticizes ''Super Size Me'' for the UnfortunateImplications it draws, arguing that Morgan Spurlock and those who agree with him come off as HolierThanThou busybodies who are trying to force people into lifestyles that they don't want.

** When the United States government managed to impose a cutting on fat (especially saturated fat) and cholesterol... it didn't work. The obesity epidemic in particular continued on.

* HollywoodHeartAttack: PlayedForLaughs. At one point, Tom consumes a 1450 calorie hamburger which the CSPI hyperbolically described as "heart attack in a bun". He records a log in the middle of the night, complaining of chest pain... except he's just fooling around. He feels great. Tom points out that if he actually suspected he had a heart attack he would have immediately gone to the hospital, not set up a camera in his bedroom for RuleOfDrama like Spurlock.

* IfItTastesBadItMustBeGoodForYou: [[AvertedTrope Averted]], because "Mother Nature isn't stupid." More specifically, Tom mentions that you like salt, sugar, and fat because they pointed to the healthiest foods in nature: nuts, olives, fruits, certain vegetables, meat and milk. Why would Mother Nature give humans a taste preference of foods that would kill humans?
* InformedFlaw: Eric Oliver notes that by the Body Mass Index's logic, he, a six-foot 190-pound guy, is overweight. This is in spite of having a somewhat lean figure.

** Before his experiment, Morgan had a "last supper" of a vegetable tart, quinoa with roasted veggie salad, artichokes, and a simple green salad... all organic, of course. Morgan gladly ate the supper. Tom's "Last Supper" was quinoa with pineapple-teriyaki tofu and chicken-flavored soy drumlets with sweet-and-sour-sauce, plus a glass of carrot juice. 22 minutes of struggle later, he orders a pizza that has pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers. Tom did not even wait until 10:00 before starting the experiment.

** John Banzmat appeared in ''Super Size Me'' and told how [=McDonald's=] influence over the obesity epidemic required legal intervention. The same clips play in ''Fat Head''... albeit with mocking subtitles that suggest that John just wants money.
** In the middle of ''Super Size Me'', Morgan is up in the middle of the night because he feels that he getting a heart attack. In ''Fat Head'', Tom implies to be getting a heart attack in the middle of the night before explicitly saying that he is up because he feels great. Tom then says that, if he felt that he is getting a heart attack, his first response would not be setting up a camera.
** In ''Super Size Me'', Morgan's girlfriend shared some information on how Morgan's diet affected his more... "intimate" matters. In ''Fat Head'', Tom asked his wife to tell the audience of those "intimate" matters.

** After his experiment, Morgan got in a purifying vegan diet... which had him lose only 1 pound a week. After his experiment, Tom went on a high-saturated-fat diet... which not only improved his health, but also gave him the energy to work in a tough programming project even into the night without getting tired.

* MoralGuardians: How Jacob Sullum portrayed people who want the government to enforce nutritional standards (especially the CSPI)... and the temperance movement. Tom calls these "food evangelists".

* VisualInnuendo: The Leaning Tower of Pisa falls down fully... whenever Naughton talks about Spurlock's impotence.

* FatIdiot: [[DeconstructedTrope Attacks this trope forward, backward, and sideways]]. For one, Tom goes against the belief that fat people eat junk because they genuinely don't know what's good or bad for them, a belief that many of the food activists and fast food critics seem to operate on. Later on, he talks about the common knee-jerk reaction to blame a fat person for failing to lose weight when dieting, when more often than not, it's because the diet that person was put on ''just doesn't work''.

** After the experiment was over, Spurlock claims that eaating so much junk food gave him a fatty liver. Tom points out that [[http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2018/01/08/morgan-spurlock-confesses-to-being-a-lying-cheating-womanizing-drunk/ Spurlock confessed that he was drunk at least once a week]] during the experiment, which would also explain the fatty liver.

** To government oversight in general. Naughton invokes LiesDamnedLiesAndStatistics to argue that it's make the obesity epidemic look worse than it really is, because the standards for overweight and obese both changed since the data began being collected. Tom notes the government oversights on fast food (like the CSPI) are either not helping or actively making things worse. Tom argues that such entities are more concerned with getting government funding than doing what they were set up to do, to the point that [[MovingTheGoalposts the CSPI starts changing what it wants from fast food restaurants after their demands get met]].