It’s been a while since I’ve watched this but they glossed over one other thing. At the end some of his medical tests showed slight improvement. I’m not advocating the diet but pointing out that the human body will try to adjust to anything you do to it.
Spurlock was only asked if he wanted to “super size” eight times in 30 days, IIRC.
Surlock claims to have consumed 5,000 calories a day. If he ate no other food besides McDonald’s, it is difficult to add up the range of possible basic McDonald’s meals and come up with that number. I went through the process of actually calculating what typical McDonald’s meals are in calories and they absolutely do NOT average 1,667 calories a meal. It sure adds up, and some combos can get you over that number, but there’s no way, if you ate every possible combo and usually didn’t super size, that you’d get close to that.
Go ahead, look up their calorie content, and just put together a bunch of typical meals. A double quarter pounder with cheese, a large fries, and a large Coke is 1640 calories - not quite enough to average 5000 a day, and that’s just about the biggest meal you can order at McDonald’s. If he’d had a bacon and egg McMuffin combo that morning for breakfast, with an OJ, that’s only 900 calories or so, so he can’t get to 5000 that day.
If in fact his claimed “rules” were true, and he was rotating through everything on the menu, it is simply not possible for him to have averaged 5000 calories a day. There is no way he could have done it.
I only watched the first 20 minutes or so of the doc a number of years ago, but I turned it off for a reason. He would go in for lunch and order a big Mac combo and a quarter pounder with cheese combo and an apple pie. The two combos would be upsized and would somehow attempt to down the entire order.
The reason that I turned it off is that there is no way a normal human being should be attempting to eat that amount of food for a single meal. But it seems that Spurlock was doing that for an entire month. He became a glutton to try to blame McD’s for his problems. The gluttony was the issue, but that isn’t to say the McD’s is entirely blameless in the bad American diet.
Wait—the school can’t afford to feed kids healthy food, but they expect parents to pack healthy food in lunchboxes every day?
If poor school food is a factor of labor costs…well…perhaps this somehow isn’t obvious to some, but there’s not a shortage of potential free labor in a school.
Yes, if they want to. Or be willing to provide the school the amount it would cost to do it. A school can’t be expected to provide something more expensive than the money it has.
Our school has never turned 1 cent of profit on lunches. In fact, we lose money sometimes.
Sounds right. Healthy food is expensive, and school budgets aren’t always enough to prioritize it.
Oh, I don’t dispute that. The part that struck me was Mahaloth saying it was expensive to “mass produce” healthy food, as though it was any less expensive to provide and package individual portions of healthy food for each kid.
Why can’t schools simply offer healthier food options and charge more for them?
That works for some schools and towns, but the kids who most need healthy meals tend to be the ones who can least afford them.
The kids on the free and reduced cost lunch program literally don’t have the money to purchase costlier meals.
Yeah, I’m kind of baffled by people who concentrate solely on the McDonald’s angle. The real story is high-fructose corn syrup being stuffed into children, contributing to nationwide obesity. That some schmoe ate at McD’s for a month… who cares?
Because Spurlock used his McDonald’s diet as a major publicity stunt for the movie. And he made specific claims about it.
So it’s fair to focus on his McDonald’s diet in judging the overall work. And it’s fair to judge the general credibility of the claims of the movie by whether or not its most public claim is true.
The way you present an argument matters.
Even if he had a good point (and he does), he presented his point in such a hamfisted way that he undercut his own argument. Sure, if we all researched the material, we could come to reasonable conclusions. But by performing his admittedly unscientific study in a stupid way, he drew attention away from the main thesis. People concentrate on the McDonald’s angle because Spurlock drew attention to it. Then again, it wouldn’t have gotten as much attention if he didn’t make McDonald’s such a big part of it. So, maybe not so stupid but not as convincing, either.
I think people misunderstand the intent and message of the film. It wasn’t that “McDonald’s is bad for you,” he was making a point about surrendering yourself to the desires of the food industry. McDonald’s was chosen simply as a symbolic example. If you eat nothing but McDonald’s, and follow their every suggestion and pitched portion size, you will die. The point was that the processed food industry doesn’t care about you, and isn’t trying to nourish you or give you what you need, only to sell you chemically engineered crap to get your money. The message was about taking responsibility for your own diet and understanding that you can’t trust the food industry to do it for you. You are garbage to them, and your health means nothing to them. You should be aware of it. They’re selling you oregano and calling it Thai stick.
The biggest logical error that I saw in Super Size Me was that he changed his exercise regimen as well as his diet. This is the opposite of a controlled experiment. It’s theoretically possible that all of his ill heath effects were due to his drastic reduction in exercise. I mean, I believe McDonald’s is terribly unhealthy, but Spurlock’s “experiment” is absolutely no evidence of this.
Obviously the lack of exercise played into it (which was another point he was trying to make, not conceal), but it’s not credible to say ONLY the lack of exercise contributed to his decline in health, and that the increased fat, carbohydrate, salt and sugar intake had nothing to do with.
Once again, the message of the movie was not, “omg, Mcdonald’s is BAD,” but take responsibility for yourself. That includes exercise.
By the way, he reduced his exercise specifically to that of the average American. It had a point to it.
(Bolding mine): That’s a good message, but I don’t remember it being the central theme of this movie. You know, I saw this movie a while ago, but I remember it being thematically centered around McDonald’s specifically and the food industry in general. (The title, the story about the people who sued McDonald’s) What the heck does exercise have to do with McDonald’s or the Junk Food Industry?
Also, what struck me was the drastic change in his exercise regimen, as well as the drastic change in his eating habits.
I guess the reason it really rubbed me the wrong way is because he presented the whole thing as some kind of “scientific experiment,” but then did so many obvious things to undermine this. Why didn’t he just change his diet to fast food? I firmly believe he still would’ve gotten negative results, but would’ve had a much more credible movie. Why undermine his own experiment?
It was an “experiment” in the sense of “Let’s try adding carrots tothe broccolli cassarole,” not “Let’s discover a new element.”
And yes, it was a publicity stunt. He wanted to promote dicussion and dialogue. He was probably elated when Fathead came out. It’s amazing to see people discussing, analyzing and expanding on your ideas. Nobody would have watched “A Sober Look at the American Diet.” No newspapers would review it. There would be no tour, no talk shows, no return on investment, and no future funding.
This is not just an ego/money thing. This is about getting ideas out there. Getting people talking- for or against doesn’t matter as long as people are thinking. And with this, he succeeded spectacularly. This very thread is a part of his success.
By all indications, even a diet completely free of McDonald’s and their portion sizes…well, y’know…
Anyway, the documentary has two lightly-related stories, and by far the more important one is American eating habits in general, not Spurlock’s 30-day Jackass audition. I don’t see how some sloppy methodology in the latter should undercut the message of the former, but mileage varies, etc.
Now excuse me while I go get a delicious McDonald’s double cheeseburger. 