There are 318.9 million people in the United States; 93 million of those people are affected by obesity. If I pull up my handy dandy computer calculator that equates to 30 percent, or 3 in 10 people dealing with issues in their lives that relate to obesity. Perhaps they have a family member who is obese. Perhaps they personally can be considered in the obese category. Perhaps their sibling or niece has childhood type-2 diabetes.

My attention was turned to the issue of obesity and sugar this weekend as I turned on my Netflix account. The top recommendation across my screen was a recently released documentary called Fed Up and upon watching it, boy was I in for an eye-opener.

The documentary starts with an emotional hook of middle and high school kids describing their personal struggles with weight and being “the fat kid” in school. One kids tells the tale of how girls in his class asked him to run for whatever reason. Later one of the girls confessed to him that they had asked him to do so because they wanted to watch his fat jiggle while he ran. That is absolutely horrible to think about the psychological stress that poor kid must have to deal with.

Intertwined with the children’s stories is the history of how the food industry has put government between a rock and hard place in promoting agriculture consumption in our country all the while trying to regulate for the health of our children and society.

According to the documentary, which is fortified with interviews from nutritionists and health experts with Ph.D.s galore, the government subsidizes the corn industry. And that would be great for our economy if only corn weren’t the main ingredient in all sugar-based additives in our food as well as preservatives.

And what’s the problem with sugar anyway? Well, the documentary pits it as the cigarette of our lifetime. It’s in literally everything we drink and eat that’s not unequivocally a fresh fruit or vegetable. It’s in bread, yogurt, processed meats, tomato sauces (pizza is a vegetable – right?), nutrition bars AND cereals. So, without conscious effort, it’s almost impossible to avoid consuming huge amounts of sugar every day.

The documentary, of course, spotlights sugary drinks and sodas as the bane of water and everything that tastes good with soda (i.e. everything). I may have been drinking a Pepsi at the time I watched the documentary, I don’t know …

According to the documentary (I’m obviously not a doctor or expert here), the body has a hard time doing anything with extra sugar but turning it into fat when it’s not processed in conjunction with fiber (i.e. an apple). And the main function of insulin is to turn sugar to fat. So the excess amounts of sugar that we inevitably eat everyday are turned into fat and cause repetitive spikes in insulin. And the excess fat makes you fat and obese.

Here’s a startling fact I learned: food labels normally give you the percentage of vitamins and minerals contained in a single serving that is of the recommended daily intake. But, if you look on any label and see the grams of sugar contained in a serving, you’ll discernibly see that the percentage is missing, for reasons beyond all intellectual arguments.

The American Heart Association recommends 25-36 grams of sugar daily (you won’t find the FDA recommended amount because they don’t have one). If you look at the label on a can of Pepsi you’ll see it contains 41 grams of sugar. So the percentage on the label should be somewhere between 114-164 percent of the recommended daily intake. You would find a similar situation on most other labels of food containing sugar.

But the main point of the documentary is the that food corporations have won by purposefully shifting the focus from the fact that they are lacing all our food with monstrous amounts of sugar, and instead to the thought that obese and even just unhealthy people are in fact, lazy. And they would like to make you believe that you are the problem. Not the food. They have made people who make poor choices to blame, not the corporations who are putting foods in our grocery stores and filling up our public school breakfast and lunch lines with their food.

But the documentary does end on a hopeful note. Experts say that this infiltration of sugar in our lives can be reversed. The population and media and government have teamed up to take on big corporations before. It was this way with smoking. It used to be perfectly legal to smoke on planes and in hospitals and advertisers were allowed to sell tobacco as sexy, cool and unrelated to health issues.

But we’ve since then put the kibosh on such misguided ideas. The FCC regulated that for each pro-smoking commercial on any station in a timeframe, there would be equal anti-smoking ads. There are also regulations against advertisements to children. With these and other forms of attack on tobacco companies, rates of smoking among teenagers has dropped from 30 percent 1993 to 18 percent in 2011.

I highly suggest watching Fed Up, which is produced and narrated by Katie Couric. The need for an awakening to the impact of sugar to our nation’s health is undeniable and the documentary shows how it could become a growing epidemic with unidentified cost and impact for future generations.