TV Skeptic: 'Weight of the Nation' is light on balance about obesity

To me, there is an 800-pound gorilla looming in the background of "The Weight of the Nation," the four-part documentary that began on Monday and concludes Tuesday on HBO. It's a menacing presence that may be hard to spot among so many 300-, 400- and 500-pound Americans on screen, but I know it's there because not so long ago I was obese.

The unseen presence, I believe, is the role that insulin plays in storing body fat. In my case, tackling that beast led to dramatic weight loss and greatly improved health and fitness.

I started learning about the relationship between insulin and fat nearly three years ago when a loved one was diagnosed with a tumor on the pituitary gland that could cause Cushing syndrome, which is characterized by a rapid progression to obesity. When our family first got this diagnosis I frantically researched the condition and learned that this tumor can start a series of responses in the body’s endocrine system resulting in high levels of insulin, which causes excess fat storage.

Whenever insulin levels in the blood rise, the body stores fat. In most people insulin rises after a meal, and rises higher after meals with a high carbohydrate content, especially simple carbs like sugar, pasta or white flour.

There is debate among scientists, researchers, physicians, nutritionists and other diet experts over just what causes obesity. One side argues it's a simple matter of energy balance: "calories in vs. calories out." The claim is that the first law of thermodynamics requires that any calories that enter the system must either be metabolized, expelled or stored, and the obesity epidemic is the result of excess calories and too little exercise.

ESPN's 'The Announcement' relives Magic Johnson's bleakest hour

The NCAA men's basketball tournament will give sports viewers plenty of hoops to feast on in the coming weeks. But before that happens, ESPN has a more serious subject to address: Earvin "Magic" Johnson's disclosure on Nov. 7, 1991, that he had HIV.

In the documentary film "The Announcement"--which ESPN will premiere on Sunday night after the NCAA selects the teams for this year's tournament--director Nelson George examines the Lakers point guard's stunning revelation from a variety of standpoints (including the player's own, as he addresses the camera in a recent interview from an empty Forum).

It's impossible not to remember the bombshell Forum press conference that autumn Thursday, and, like the JFK assassination or Challenger explosion, where we were when we heard it. "The Announcement" shows what happened behind the scenes: how Johnson learned of his illness, the anxiety over telling family and teammates and the fallout that occurred once he did. The film uses a similar format to many of the network's "30 for 30" films--talking-head interviews, prominent music cues, archival footage--to tell a story that most of us, it turns out, know only superficially.

At a screening in downtown Los Angeles last week, just a stone's throw from where the Lakers now play, Johnson was in attendance, beaming his million-dollar smile as he introduced the movie and shouting out to sponsors who had made the film and its promotion possible. There were many, and Johnson was happy to name-check them all..

Then he got serious for a moment. "Andre was the one who had to go through a lot when you think of 20 years ago," Johnson said, referring to his son, who was 10 at the time of the announcement and was in attendance at the screening. "He didn't know if [his] dad was going to be here."

The network has also been promoting the documentary heavily--commentators reminisced about the surreal period during a break in the Big West championship Saturday night, for instance--and it's easy to see why.

In the film,  we see Johnson and his likable brio as he emerges as a phenom from Michigan State. "I don't know if everyone feels they were born to do something...but I did," he recalls. The winning, and hard-partying culture, surrounding the '80s and early '90s Lakers is on display, expressed through the recollections of celebrities such as Chris Rock. Then Johnson is given the news, and a good-times story suddenly turns dismal. Johnson grapples with the diagnosis, then watches as the NBA and the world grapple too.

Indeed, like "The Fab Five," the network's post-selection film from last year, "The Announcement" takes a scalpel to larger social issues. In this case, it's the fear of AIDS, expressed via the likes of Karl Malone, who declared that it was unfair for Johnson to play because Malone wouldn't feel comfortable guarding him. To watch "The Announcement" is to call to mind a time when a hero was suddenly vulnerable (not to mention a Lakers dynasty abruptly imperiled) but also to remind ourselves of a larger social anxiety over a virus we were only beginning to understand.

"The Announcement" is also deeply personal, a document of a magnetic character and his reaction to terrible news. "I wasn’t scared to announce it; I wasn’t scared of the media. What I was scared of is… would I see [friends and teammates] again?” he says in the film.

Nor is Johnson (treated with a fair degree of hagiography)  the only protagonist: his wife, Cookie, who Laker fans will remember well from the announcement, gets ample screen time and emerges as a three-dimensional character,  first wary, then supportive.

AIDS expert David Ho notes in the film that the drug cocktail Johnson has taken has given the star an immune system nearly identical to that of a person without the virus. Johnson, who has had a successful second career as an entrepreneur behind movie theaters and restaurants, suggests this is  a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it shows what is possible to accomplish with HIV and a curse because it blunts the cautionary aspects of his story.

Sitting in a downtown Los Angeles movie theater watching Johnson look as healthy as ever, though, it was hard not to focus on the former.

RELATED:

Magic Johnson to head Comcast channel Aspire

Jeremy Lin and ESPN: Network rushes to quell furor over slur

Ron Jaworski booted from ESPN's Monday Night Football booth

--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Earvin "Magic" Johnson making the announcement on Nov. 7, 1991. Credit: ESPN

Review: 'Steve Jobs -- One Last Thing' on PBS

The death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Oct. 5 was not unexpected, and PBS has his video obituary ready to air. "Steve Jobs -- One Last Thing," which premieres Wednesday night at 10, offers a decent enough survey of the ups and downs and ups of his career and of the products he helped create or understood how to sell. But in broad terms it won't tell you anything about Jobs you couldn't have just assumed -- that he was a brilliant, difficult person whom some people loved and other people did not -- and in narrower terms offers nothing that has not already been discussed at great length elsewhere. (There is a small bit of unseen interview footage, from 1994, that is getting promotional play -- the gist of it is, don't let other people define your life -- but it contains no revelations.) Network press releases call the show "unflinching," and it's true that  the hour is not given completely over to praising him, but all in all it is a brief for Jobs' Promethean importance and makes him look cooler than his critics even when his critics have a point.

Which is, of course, what Apple itself does: Their computers represent not the triumph of the nerds, but the continuing hegemony of the popular kids who look down on the nerds from above the roll of their expensive black turtlenecks. Although the Mac is the favored tool of design and film and music professionals, the PC -- cheaper, customizable, easy to upgrade -- is the people's computer. (The company's fortune is founded on those other machines, the iPod, iPhone, iPad, the must-have heralds of the post-computer world.) That Jobs' drive and Apple's drive -- the two elements being virtually synonymous at least since Jobs' return to the company 15 years ago -- to constantly improve the product supports a business model based on rapid planned obsolescence is really not so cool at all. (For the record, I am writing this on a PC, and I don't feel one whit less groovy for it. Of course I am also a person who has just used the word "groovy" in a sentence.)

MS-13 gangs linked with L.A., Salvador in National Geographic documentary

 

MS-13, shorthand for "Mara Salvatrucha," is one of the world's most lethal gangs, with a power and reach that exceeds that of some national governments. It has ravaged the tiny Central American country of El Salvador, and its influence extends into neighboring Honduras and elsewhere.

But MS-13 isn't a homegrown Salvadoran phenomenon. It's an export from Los Angeles, where many gang members were initiated as adolescents and young adults, before being deported back to El Salvador and taking their violent methods with them. Today, as depicted in the new documentary "Gang Warfare USA," airing at 8 Monday night on the National Geographic Channel, MS-13 members in El Salvador work with their U.S. counterparts to export violence to cities as remote from L.A. as Greensboro, N.C.

Marc Shaffer, the film's director, producer and writer, and his crew detail the disturbing story of how a restaurant murder in Greensboro eventually led investigators to L.A. and El Salvador. Along the way, they uncover how Uncle Sam's deportation of MS-13 members to El Salvador ironically has been making the gang even stronger and more globalized than before.

In interviews with current and former gang members, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, attorneys and others, the documentary exposes that many gang members deported to El Salvador, where economic prospects are bleak, soon turn right around and cross back into the United States.

Meanwhile, the gang's presence in El Salvador continues to undermine the rule of law in that war-torn country: El Salvador, with a population of only 6 million, has a murder rate 10 times that of the United States, and officials estimate that 70 percent of those murders are gang-related. As one assistant U.S. attorney tells the filmmakers, "We set up the conditions by which MS-13 flourished."

RELATED:

Guided guerrilla tours

El Salvador reclaiming its past

Salvador pop heroes will relive Buenas Epocas at Hollywood Park

— Reed Johnson 

Photo: A member of Mara Salvatrucha is detained in San Salvador. Credit: Roberto Escobar / European Pressphoto Agency.