> Besides just gaining weight, the movie also claimed that Spurlock got major liver damage and started suffering from a range of mental health issues, all as a result of eating fast food. Notably, none of the people who replicated the experiment suffered from these problems.
> Years after the movie’s release Spurlock admitted to being a lifelong alcoholic, despite claiming otherwise in the documentary. Alcohol abuse can easily explain the liver damage, and alcohol withdrawal during the filming of the documentary also explains the sudden mental health problems he was experiencing.
Hmm, I'm not sure what to think with this new information.
I really enjoyed the documentary when I watched it as a kid. But I did remember thinking it was weird he puked so early in the film. I brushed it off as "everyone is different", and forgot about it.
> But I did remember thinking it was weird he puked so early in the film. I brushed it off as "everyone is different", and forgot about it.
That's one of the few things I still remember from it, and the takeaway I had was "well, he's eating past the point of nausea, of course he's going to puke." And the fact that he accepted any time they offered to "supersize", just pointing out how hard fast food pushes excess calories. Kind of the point of the documentary, really, that fast food is out of control in this country and needs to be regulated.
The fact that he force fed himself kinda weakens the point though, doesn't it? Force feeding yourself 5,000 calories a day even when you feel sick is obviously going to make you sick.
I don’t get the ‘eating 5000 calories of anything would make you ill’ argument against the movie. That was sort of the whole point. At the time, fast food chains, and McDonald’s in particular, were pushing large (and the defunct supersize) meals all the time. That this was dangerous, especially for people who didn’t really think about it and trusted the companies, was the entire point of the movie.
Note that things have changed since then - arguably as a result of, or at least accelerated by, the movie. Supersize meals disappeared soon after it, salads were introduced (yes, you can argue they’re still high calorie), and on the whole fast food places are much less aggressively pushing the larger meals than they were in the early 2000s. I would say there’s more awareness of the importance of eating healthily among the general population too (not that that seems to be having ideal results…)
I'm confused about why you're confused. The point of the movie was definitely not to give the audience the shocking realism that if you're force feeding yourself to the point of vomiting, you're probably doing something wrong. This aspect of the movie only lessens the actual argument of the movie (except that it makes good headlines and thus probably drove the majority of the media coverage and general interest in the documentary).
At the time, fast food chains, and McDonald’s
in particular, were pushing large (and the
defunct supersize) meals all the time. That
this was dangerous [...]
It's still a little bit ridiculous.
A human being should be eating 90 meals per month, give or take. If more than 1 or 2 of those are fast food, that's the problem.
To what standard should we be holding a restaurant meal? "Is it healthy for a person to eat 90 of these meals per month?" doesn't seem like a useful or realistic thing to do.
> A human being should be eating 90 meals per month, give or take. If more than 1 or 2 of those are fast food, that's the problem.
3 meals a day has nothing to do with health and everything to do with marketing. If the way we eat had any ties to common sense we wouldn't be eating our largest meal at the end of the day when we have nothing left to do except sleep.
"Food deserts" (areas with no access to fresh food) are a huge problem, yeah.
Also, economically struggling people often can't prepare their own food, even if given groceries for free: they may be physically disabled, they may be unhoused, they may be unable to afford utilities or appliances, etc.
However, I think that altering the offerings of fast-food restaurants is not even remotely a suitable way to address that.
> I don’t get the ‘eating 5000 calories of anything would make you ill’ argument against the movie.
Good thing that's not the argument I'm making in my comment. The argument I'm making is about forcing yourself to eat more than you want to while the very act of eating is making you feel sick. That's what Spurlock did in the movie; it's not representative of any significant population of people.
I was curious, looks like the equivalent (calorie-wise) of fries & a double cheeseburger is 1KG of salad.*
So yes, quite hard to overeat salad. Plus, eating that much salad would give a lot of nutrition, and throwing some beans & hemp hearts in would give you a lot of protein too.
Further to consider, it's not uncommon for people to eat the extra large fries and have two double cheeseburgers. The comparison to trying to overeat salad is only more favorable. We can also go furthe rand think of"fancy" burger places like Red Robin, there are several burgers on their menu that are over 2k calories.
* For the back of the napkin math - according to google, there's 815 calories in a fries and a double cheeseburger. For salad, I used this house salad recipe [1] as reference with 148 calories in a 170g serving
And yeah, the vegetables aren't the problem here - the problem is everything has to be sugar-coated (yes, even "savory" things like ranch dressing) for people to eat it, and then they drench everything from wings to burgers in it.
The argument is that they’re ‘misleading’ because the _dressings_ that are provided with them are surprisingly high in calories. Like, a standard size salad with all the provided dressing is not lower calorie than one of the more traditional menu options - and people may not realize that.
I’d say the salads are pretty good BTW - better than you might think a fast food place would do.
Think the point is that it's real easy to force feed yourself 5000 calories if it's 2500 calorie meals that don't fill you up for the day.
honestly the burger itself isn't too bad. Double quarter pounder is 750 calories, really filling. But tripling that from fries and drink is the real killer. You can probably lose weight from McDonald's simply by only getting water or unsweetened tea for a drink, and limiting yourself to small sides.
> it's real easy to force feed yourself 5000 calories
No it's not. If you have to force it, it's by definition not "easy". Overindulging in something is different from forcing yourself to do it. My problem with the movie is that it takes a very strange scenario (man forces himself to eat to the point of puking) and acts like that's teaching us lessons about the broader population, none of whom are doing that. It might be bad for you to eat unhealthy things that feel pleasurable, but it's obviously worse to do it so much that it's become an ordeal.
"ease" is relative here. And if you really care about that debate you can find some social media challenge posts fantasizing about how you'd consume 10000+ calories for 1b dollars. I wouldn't drone much more on that point past calorie density being an undertalked about issue with these "calories in, calories out" crowd.
Main point: consuming 3000 excess calories a day roughly equates to an average person gaining 5 points a week, 20 pounds a month (which tracks with the documentary). That is extreme. But think of 1000 excess calories (2 pounds a week) and do it over a year. We know which one is worse, and we know which one is more common. And we know it doesn't just stop after a year.
I think there's merit in demonstrating an extreme experiment (especially in this day of social media) and using it to demonstrate what happens from less extreme, but longer term bad habits.
"that fast food is out of control in this country and needs to be regulated."
Eh, I would rather see change in the area of education and alternatives than just food type/portion/etc regulation. The education can apply to multiple foods and not just the pariah of the day. Ingredient studies and approvals/disapproval would be an area of regulation that I would support though.
Having the declarative knowledge then being able to practice it. I am sure most people know that they are supposed to eat 'healthy'. It can only be one part of a larger program to combat obesity.
Many people don't know just how unhealthy it really is. Many also don't know how to make or choose their own healthy food. It's mostly about habits. It's fine to eat a super-sized meal rarely if you were hungry enough and extremely active, but it's more of an exception.
If we extend this to alcohol, then we should ban all alcohol. Alcohol is generally fine in moderation or occasional use. But if we need to ban things because a minority of the population misuses it, then we will have an extremely long list (butter, sausage, steak, etc).
Tho person you replied to didn't say 'ban' they said 'regulate' and 'a larger plan to combat obesity', and your counter of alcohol is heavily regulated across the world. Some have government run shops, others have advertising bans, or mandatory health warnings, alcohol content labelling and so on. And probably in general should be more regulated.
It read like a ban to me. Other than age restrictions, which vary wildy, it doesn't seem like alcohol regulations have done anything to prevent unhealthy use.
Then you need to increase your reading comprehension. I nowhere said or implied "ban".
Or you need to examine your biases; are you perchance a libertarian? Or really right-leaning in any way. If you're American, chances are very good the answer is 'yes'.
He was also gaining more weight than the laws of thermodynamics allow based on how many calories he was supposedly eating. Alcohol has a lot of calories.
sure but from google, he gained 25 pounds in a month. a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. 3500 calories/pound * 25 pounds / 30 days = 2916 calorie surplus. Morgan Spurlock is a 188cm tall man, which let's say he's 30 years old and 100kg (wikipedia says he gained 24.5 pounds/13% body mass), doing no to little exercise (he did walk 2km a day) that gives a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) of 2406 calories per day (used this calculator : https://www.calculator.net/tdee-calculator.html?cage=25&csex...).
So basically, he had to be eating at the very bare minimum 5400 calories per day to get that much weight. To be fair, the wiki page says he did average 5k calories per day so he would have been lying only about 400 calories (minimum) per day.
Checking online, supersize me fried are ~600 calories and a big mac ~600. So let's say you eat that 3 times a day, that's 1200*3 = "only" 3600 calories. I find it hard to believe he drank 1800 calories worth of drinks per day to fill the gap, especially since he was allowed to drink water. Looking at canadian mcdonald's website, a large pepsi is 290 cals/77 grams of sugar, were supersize me really double that? If so, I guess the conclusion is don't drink 462g (literally over a pound) of sugar.
Your math is off because you're forgetting the beverage:
~600 kcal for a Big Mac
~600 kcal for Super Size fries (7 oz)
~500 kcal for a Super Size Coca Cola (42 oz)
1700 kcal/meal or ~5000 kcal/day if breakfast is the same as lunch and dinner
The calorie count for breakfast will likely vary. Note that orange juice contains more calories than Coca Cola per volume, but I don't remember a Super Size fountain orange juice existing.
Egg McMuffin and coffee for breakfast and then a Big Mac, medium fries and iced tea (or diet Coke or water) for both lunch and dinner is... 2130 calories. Not the pinnacle of the healthiest diet for sure. Over 30 days for a mid-sized dude, you might gain... one pound.
Absolutely, drinking diet coke or water is cutting out an enormous number of calories, as-is medium fries.
Heck, I only weight 185lbs and back when I ate mcDonald's a single Egg McMuffin wasn't nearly enough food to make me feel full. I'd get two and a hash brown, and still be hungry and hour later.
In the sister comment, I did some math and because the guy was 188cm and 220 pounds to start with, he needs 2400 calories per day just to keep his weight. He would have lost at least half a pound per week with the diet you just mentioned.
Not a doctor fwiw, but elevated ALT and AST levels often comes with being overweight and that could be seen as liver damage. I'm willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt on this claim.
Alcohol is definitely a confounding factor here but this documentary is more of a "social experiment" rather than a proper study.
It's patient sample size (n=1) and doctor (n=1). IIRC, the 2 other doctors MS consulted (cardiologist and a gastroenterologist) didn't mention the same opinion as the internal med doctor and the doctor who did voice the skepticism was also saying it shouldn't be a no brainer that eating Mcdonalds would cause health problems. Other doctors on the web have gone on record to say "this makes sense."
Obviously it doesn't absolve MS of unethical filmmaking practices but that doesn't mean the premise is false given the plethora of other medical literature that supports it.
> Remarkable the hand waving people go through to excuse dishonesty because they want to believe it so badly.
What I find remarkable is how badly people want to ignore just how bad fast food is for you. They'll use anything to dismiss completely the whole debate.
I just thought it was a bad reaction to a change of diet. You can feel bad just from a few days of bad food. Can't imagine 3 meals a day for that kind of stuff.And ofc these were large portions for a (by BMI standards) very slight overweight man.
Umm who in America doesn’t know someone personally who has visible liver damage from fast food? I know multiple families where 4/4 people have it. Why would he make that up? He didn’t even go diabetic.
Even during the course of the documentary, at the end his doctors were saying his body was seeming to adapt to his new diet so always found it unsatisfactory that it just ended right there.
It's unfortunate that on the day of his death all I can really think about is how troubled the man was, between dealing with alcoholism, cheating on his past wives / gfs, the sexual assault allegations, and resigning from his company because of just how negative his public image had become. He became something of a household name because of a misleading documentary that was arguably more about the dangers of alcoholism rather than fast food.
Strange processing the death of someone with such a mixed legacy.
The blog post mentioned in the nbcnews link mentions more of his problems in addition to alcoholism, adultery/infidelity - broken family during childhood, sexual abuse, depression, etc.
A society of overweight and obese people giving enormous attention on how the effects of eating McDonalds everyday cannot be replicated. Please let's snapshot everything so the future generations can laugh at how we turned into a parody.
Well the problem is that he stuffed his face with absurd amounts of calories everyday. Of course he got fat. He was eating like 5k calories a day. No one is doing that on accident cause they didnt know how big a supersize fry was.
So yes, its a super disingenious doc that is laughably transparent in its pandering to people just like you who want to make fun of obesity and trivialize it.
There are, or at least at the time there were a lot of people whose meals come entirely from fast food. There wasnt a lot of awareness about how bad that could be and there had been a decades long trend towards replacing meals with microwave dinners and fast food. Supersize Me did play a part in reversing that trend. It was trying to make a very valid point about fast food and dining habits. So its science wasnt exact, but complaining about that is like quibbling with a Michael Moore documentary for being a little loose with facts
I disagree that there wasn't enough awareness. As someone who was alive at the time, there was a pre-existing moral panic about fast food and there were constant discussions before Supersize Me about how unhealthy it was, not to mention pop culture jokes making fun of it. I think that pre-existing anxiety was one of the reasons so many people saw the film.
I was definitely alive at the time and remember no such moral panic. I remember how much more acceptable it was in the 80's and 90's, even in upper middle class families to have 'tv dinners' and I think even for a time in the 70's and earlier (though I wasn't alive) dining out on fast food was a fashionable novelty. I very strongly remember when there was a discernible cultural shift which saw the likes of Whole Foods going mainstream and then the shift after that when even regular grocery stores started to have organic food and in-store bakeries which they didn't have before. And fast food chains started to consciously introduce salads and drop trans-fats and make other changes to seem more healthy. The shift started before Super-size me but I remember how shocking it was and how it helped to define the new zeitgeist that books like Erich Schlosser's Fast Food Nation were also helping to create. I think Super-Size me was even directly responsible for the fast food chains changing their menu part.
Are you referring to 2004 when the movie came out? Just curious what "at the time" means. My personal recollection, the early 2000s was part of a pushback and the movie was part it.
As a trend from the late 80s to 90s, fast food was on the upswing I'd say. Think back to the 1940s when most American's were not getting enough calories, the average American at the time was not getting enough calories. Fast forward to past the 60s when teenage car culture is all the rage, fast food is part of that picture. If there was effectively no fast food before 1950, and by 2000's it was culturally waning, it raises the question of when was peak fast food? Both in terms of cultural "coolness/acceptanced" and per-capita consumption. I don't know if the per-capita consumpion has gone down, but in terms of culture, I'd guess that happened in the early to mid 90s. Probably co-incided with America being mostly under-nourished, to now "over-nourished" (nourished in quotes as there, as soda calories etc are not really nourishment)
>No one is doing that on accident cause they didnt know how big a supersize fry was.
People have definitely become more aware of what they eat since the documentary came out. And I'm not sure how much of that can specifically be credited to the documentary but if we are still talking about than it clearly has done something right in raising awareness.
Obviously if you are doing research in this area you were never going to cite Super Size Me as it was never serious scientific research.
Were still talking about it because the movie very effectively sold a lie.
Ever tried to eat 5k calories in a day. I bet you cant. No one, and I mean no one, was taking fast food to the extremes he was without really really trying.
I bet you can. easily. I used to eat ~6000 calories a day during training while doing competitive rowing in college. not hard with nutrient-dense foods.
your average chipotle burrito is like half way there. throw in a breakfast, snack, and light dinner and easily 5k calories.
In case you didn't read the article linked: Morgan had a history of alcoholism and admitted later on to drinking during the experiment. That would definitely influence things, and explain why he had symptoms in his liver similar to an alcoholic.
The experiment may have been flawed but it was clearly highlighting a real issue. One that isn't just a one month stint but a multi-decade lifestyle.
Yes, indeed. That is the real real issue. People are mean to each other and fight? Just be nice. World hunger? Just share food. Rent too high? Just live together.
If only complex issues had simple solutions. Until then let's look at the layer above and solve that:
- government subsidies high fructose corn syrup, a calorie rich good.
- subsidized syrup used in almost all pre-processed food.
- is sold cheap, so it can target lower income individuals
- lower income individuals have less access to resources on dieting, or even nutrition facts.They also have less time to research such issue as they now need multiple jobs to barely pay rent.
- obesity increases in the US, disproportionately from lower income people
So we have 2-3 ways to tackle this issue past "just eat less".
Except that issue you brought up is NOT what supersize me is about. Its competitor doc, Fathead, is about that though. And absolutely lambastes supersize me.
And im not saying just eat less to fight obesity. Im saying portion sizes at a resteraunt are a moot point. People stop eating when they are no longer hungry. Do you always eat 100% of the food you get at a restaurant? Again, peiple treat obese people like theyre too stupid to figure out how they got fat, or theyre too weak minded and must have dietary decisions made for them. Fuck that. Theyre adults free to make choices like anyone else. Im all for education about nutrition, and supersize me offers 0 in that department.
>Do you always eat 100% of the food you get at a restaurant?
Given how I grew up poor, yes. Yes I do. Restaurants that weren't a McDonald's were a treat (not that I wasted McDonald's). Wasting food was about the worst thing I could do to my grandparents. Any food I didn't eat at the restaurant was tomorrow's dinner. That mentality doesn't just go away even when your lifestyle improves and food is no longer scarce.
>Again, peiple treat obese people like theyre too stupid to figure out how they got fat, or theyre too weak minded and must have dietary decisions made for them. Fuck that.
Call them what you want. You asked for answers and you're rejecting the reality of the situation. The answer for obesity isn't just "make better life choices". It's a mental addiction like alcoholism, we need to treat it like so if we want results, instead of some excuse to degrade people (again, people are are disproportionately lower class income)
>that issue you brought up is NOT what supersize me is about.
Okay. My answer isn't really isn't about supersize me anymore. That ended when I spent my first response giving context to the situation and you decided to diverge the topic with "well what's the answer?". I
I got more subtle answers around 10th-12th grade with other documentaries. The education has to start somewhere. Supersize me is a decently engaging starting point. But I'm not in 5th grade anymore. I have other, more subtle documentaries to reference for that question.
I don't really hold it in regard anymore than I hold my 3rd grade math book. It did it's job, I'm thankful for it. I don't need to go back and tear it apart over how many things it gets wrong. I'm no longer its audience.
If you're for education, stop lambasting 2nd grade math just because it "lies" about negative numbers for a while. Sometimes it's easier to contrive a system and then build on it later by denouncing those simplicities. If you don't understand calories in/out (and yes, some people don't. Gotta start somewhere), you won't understand the issue with corn syrup subsidies, you won't have all the dots to connect, and you may not put them all together in one sitting.
>Theyre adults free to make choices like anyone else.
And child obesity skyrocketed around the same time too (another documentary I watched that I can't recall). I think it's falling over the last decade, but let's not pretend this is an issue relegated to "smart adults".
>People stop eating when they are no longer hungry
I have and sadly do still stress eat. Once more: stop treating this like obesity can just be solved by saying "eat less". It's like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking.
Not only that it has the same issues as lying about Covid in the name of “public safety” - when people find out it’s a lie they’ll trust the next thing you say even if it’s 100% true.
