Think all you have to do to lose weight is eat fewer calories and work out more? Think again, says Fed Up, a new documentary film that argues Americans have been largely misled about the causes of the U.S. obesity epidemic, The New York Times reports.

According to the movie’s executive producers Katie Couric, former anchor of The CBS Evening News, and Laurie David, who helped produce the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the film shows that increasing levels of sugar consumption and processed foods could actually be playing an outsized role in producing our nation’s oversized children.

This means our current ideas about obesity and calories are off the mark. “The implicit suggestion is that there are no bad calories, just bad people eating too much,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard whose research was cited in the documentary. “But the evidence is very clear that not all calories are created equal as far as weight gain and obesity. If you’re focusing on calories, you can easily be misguided.”

Indeed, a number of studies show that the body absorbs calories from different foods differently. For example, the calories from high-fiber foods, such as nuts and vegetables, are only partially absorbed by the body and the excess is excreted.

Couric said the film doesn’t pretend to answer all the questions to the obesity crisis, but she hopes Fed Up will “spur some solutions.”

Studies also show zero-calorie artificial sweeteners are actually more likely than sugar to make you fat. Click here for more information.