A documentary by Michèle Hozer. Rating unavailable.

What do big oil, tobacco, and the processed-food industry have in common? The resources and the will to flood any discussion of their merits with impenetrable noise.

Refined sugar is not as great a villain, at least in macro terms, as the others. But evidence began pouring in during the early 1970s that its increasing presence in almost everything we buy at Safeway was leading to obesity, early-onset diabetes, and a host of liver problems among rich and poor.

Using tobacco tactics, and some of the same PR flacks, sugar manufacturers—already no sweethearts when it came to exploiting cheap labour in Latin America—deftly turned everyone’s attention to cholesterol, thus launching a “fat-free” fad that persists today. This required, oh, something else to compensate for unpalatability. So these days, we’re swallowing about four times as much white death as we were in 1974. In 50 or so variations (fructose, dextrose, et al.), sugar is exempted from full disclosure on U.S. and Canadian food labels.

This sugar-stripped observation from the dedicated (if somewhat glib) Dr. Robert Lustig was likewise made in Fed Up, Katie Couric’s similarly themed doc. Activist researcher Stanton Glantz, interviewed here, was also central to last year’s Merchants of Doubt, talking about the professional obfuscators who poison all national health debates.

The new film’s big “get” is Cristin Kearns, a Colorado dentist who noticed that all her inner-city patients had cavities in all of their teeth. She started drilling into documents found in an abandoned sugar factory, and the highlights are bitter indeed.

This fairly comprehensive overview was well written by Canadian-TV veteran Roxana Spicer and cleverly directed by Michèle Hozer, who previously made effective profiles of pianist Glenn Gould and painter Tom Thomson. Their discoveries will have you thinking twice before reaching for that “all-natural” energy bar.

Additional fun fact: the Fattest City in America is Corpus Christi.