As our nameless heroine collapses in afternoon traffic, exhausted and dejected after another tiring day of chugging Diet Coke in the pale light of a word processor, she turns on the 'car radio to listen to find a relevant message broadcast. “…So many people want to know about diets because so many people will try them, but they don’t work…some weight will be lost temporarily.” Harvey Diamond, author, was speaking. “But let me ask you something: do you want to stay healthy temporarily? No. But you want to lose weight temporarily. They are – they have failures built into them.”□□□Hungry for Change is the recent documentary by nutritional consultants turned filmmakers James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch. This duo, together with producer Enzo Tedeschi, are the minds behind Food Matters, another highly successful film that denounces modern diets. Hungry for Change sets out to do better than previous films in this documentary subgenre by offering a supposed "solution" to the many problems raised. They do so not only by driving home the point made by the previous film about making clear the terribleness of a processed food diet, but by intrinsically offering the audience a proposition to switch to a more natural diet (e.g., Paleolithic, raw vegan diets or vegetarian, “juices”) and using a holistic approach to diet. There was also a fair warning against "fad diets" in the first half of the film, as well as a general philosophy towards dieting for health rather than weight. The film immediately sets the tone from the beginning by introducing various "interdisciplinary experts"' who equally took part in the film's narrative. As the discussion develops, however, the narrators appear to have... half the paper...ll, the accuracy and fairness of the arguments presented within suffer from the financial interest of those professionals within the movie. The argument relies on the ethics attributed to perceived authority figures, attributing correlation as causation, in order to drive home a marketable lifestyle that focuses more on pathos-laden reasoning than logical foundation. Based on the potential demographic, it could very well be effective in achieving the goal of those involved in the film. If this is indicative of any other film in this genre, then it highlights a worrying pattern within modern nutrition documentaries. The money spent on post-production of this film would be better used to do actual research to back up the claims made. While the traditional American diet is definitely hungry for change, it's also hungry for science.
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