A recap of the film:
and
I find it very hard to believe that this guy got so sick from eating McDonalds. Whatever effects eating McDonalds causes is long-term and slow.
I think Mr. Spurlock faked his documentary and McDonalds should’ve sued him for libel (although, that may backfire by giving the film even more publicity.)
What do you think?
Ebert’s linked comments pretty much answer your questions IMO.
Yes it was “unreal” in that he ate whatever was suggested when upsized so he was forcing himself (by default) to consume 5000 calories a day or about twice the calories he should normally be eating so that was staged or unrealistic relative to normal intake levels. I have no problem believing he had medical issues while intaking the epic levels of fat and sodium he was consuming.
But… and Ebert also makes this point, even at low caloric intake levels McDonalds still has unhealthy amounts of of fat and sodium relative to the nutrition it is providing.
So “staged” yes, “faked” no.
I will say that he was misleading on some points(at least I thinks so). I swear that he says that schools can offer healthy foods at the same cost at the (admittedly) crappy food they currently serve.
My school district looked into it. No way. Outrageous cost to mass produce the kind of foods that would be better for kids.
To be fair, we actively ask parents to only buy lunch a few times a week at most.
I thought he showed an example of a school that did serve better lunches. Of course, just because that school was able to provide a better lunch doesn’t mean that yours could.
He did show an example, yes. Didn’t go into any detail, though, so perhaps it required much better (paid) staff to take cheap but healthy ingredients and make food from scratch rather than just shoving something in a microwave.
Pretty much my opinion. I have no doubt that a MacDonald’s diet is bad for you and will take years off your life. But I have a hard time believing that it would kill an otherwise healthy person in a month.
IIRC, he lived with a vegan girlfriend, so I imagine he was eating healthy before going on his binge. So, I can believe his body had trouble adjusting going from that to eating nothing but McDonalds.
Like most of these shockumentaries there is a counter-shockumentary out there called “Fathead”. My wife and I watched it one night when we were bored. It’s not as entertaining as other docs but it pretty much tears apart Super Size Me from beginning to end, showing where Spurlock was dishonest in his doc. One of the big ways Spurlock deceived was he refused to open up his food logs to anyone to audit them, which really damages a researchers credibility. In fact the guy in Fathead ate McDs for a month and lost 5 pounds I think.
Granted who knows how honest the Fathead guy was but his info was pretty straightforward and seemed on point.
Fathead It was on Netflix streaming. Not sure if it is now or not.
Exactly.
Here’s a National Review 2005 interview with a woman who tried eating exclusively at Mcdonald’s for a month, with an emphasis on a balanced diet, a moderate amount of exercise and 2,000 calories a day. Her chloresteral and weight went down.
Seems to me that “Super Size Me” is dishonest as hell. The kind of “documentary” that uses bad methodology into convincing those too willing to accept him without inquiry that Mickey D’s is bad for you and shortens your life by years.
http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/whaley_200506230747.asp
He also purposely stopped exercising because he thought it make him more similar to the “average American.”
It’s too bad the average American participates in exercise or sports around twice a week.
People who set out to eat as healthfully as possible at McDonald’s, and exercise assiduously, aren’t exactly being “honest” either, if staging is perceived as dishonesty. That also doesn’t represent how typical people eat at McDonald’s.
Even Soso Whaley’s diet was far from ideal; the range of vegetables available in fast food is quite limited, overall fiber content in the menu is low, and so on. What she demonstrated was not that McDonald’s is good food, but rather that a person with knowledge and dedication can make the best of a poor offering.
Chazz Weaver, described as “a fitness aficionado and weight lifter,” spent more than an hour working out every day.
I can certainly imagine his reaction to eat that food regularly made him feel like crap. If you had to rate me on a healty eating / healthy volume scale, I’d probably be somewhere between the top 50 percent and top 25 percent of americans. I am also pretty much the weight I am supposed to be and get a good days exercise pretty much once a week recreating on the weekend.
In the recent past I’ve done the following. Eaten a giant Dairy Queen chilidog. Eaten 10 pieces of Popeyes fried chicken in the span of an afternoon. Eaten a couple of really big steaks. Eaten a big big portion of fried seafood. While not exactly feeling all young and frisky afterwards, I at least felt okay.
OTOH, in the recent past I got a standard sized Whataburger with fries and a shake. And I’ve gotten a midsized burger, large fries, and a large shake from McDonalds.
Those two made me feel like crap for the following 24 hours give or take. Kinda like being hung over without the headache or having not got any sleep but lots of exercise recently. And similiar results have occured regularly in the past when my cravings have overuled my memory and wisdom.
Now, I don’t have some food snob hate of fast food or moral objections to these places but at least for me there is something about the food that makes me feel like crap. If I ate it regularly and in the volume he did I shudder to think how craptacularly bad I would feel. So, at least for me I can imagine his feeling like crap wasn’t made up and even if he had kept the caloric intake to something reasonable he IMO would have still felt pretty crappy.
Thank you, just what I was going to say.
Spurlock deliberately chose to eat what he felt the ‘average person’ would eat when they went to McD’s, which more often than not would be an Extra Value Meal. Yeah, you can lose weight if all your meals are a regular hamburger and a diet coke, but McD’s isn’t advertising that as a meal, it’s advertising a Quarter Pounder with large fries as a meal. He also stated right up front that he would, at some point, eat everything offered on the menu, and always Super Size if asked, though I don’t believe he ever chose to otherwise.
His point in the whole film wasn’t “McD’s makes you fat,” it was that American food consumption in general is terrible. From a young age we’re conditioned to think wrongly about portion sizes, that food makes you happy, and that it’s easier/better/cheaper to just get fast food/pre-made stuff. The “non-McD” portion of his film (which takes up as much, if not more, than the McD stuff) goes into this a lot, especially with school lunch programs and such, yet no one cares about that they just focus on “wow, he proved McDonald’s is bad for you…everyone knew that.”
My theory was he just wanted an excuse to go off the vegan diet…
I could buy pretty much everything I saw in the documentary, except the part where his doctor found drastic health consequences. I can believe that he felt crappy, perhaps the worst he’s felt in his life, barring serious infection or injury, but not that anyone who ate like that for a month was seriously risking keeling over.
My suspicion is that Spurlock personally has some condition that triggered it. I simply can’t believe that just eating McDonald’s for a month, even if it is 5,000 calories a day, will bring you to the brink of death so quickly. I would like to see more rigorous scrutiny of the situation.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but I think describing his condition as “the brink of death” is quite an exaggeration.
Yes, that’s the point. His doctor was begging him not to complete the month. It seemed like a comelet overreaction.
“fat head” actually covers this… apparently Spurlock claimed to have kept a food diary of what he ate, but won’t let anyone review it. IIRC THe guy did the math for the claimed calories taken in, and figured each meal would have had to have been a combo, supersized, with an extra sandwich and apple pies.
Of course you can do this. Eating a balanced diet along with exercise will make you healthier no matter where you eat. Spurlock’s point was that people that eat fast food the most don’t do either which magnifies the effects of the unhealthy food.
Did he fake something? Maybe, I don’t know but the counter argument you cite is ridiculous (note, I am not saying you are ridiculous, I am saying the person who decided to do this was ridiculous; it is like trying to prove water is wet).
Edit: looks like other people said what I said. I should read on before responding 