Re the ad campaign started in McDonalds Australia to respond to this film. I have not seen the movie “Super Size Me”, but I have read enough reviews of it to get the flavor. IMO if McDonalds had just kept their mouth shut people would have forgotten about it in a few months. Now they’re jump starting the debate all over again. It’s a film makers prayer come true. Now I’ve gotta see the movie.
Having said this, am I wrong? Is the movie that powerful that it needed to be countered with an ad campaign?
Their reaction is kind of like the tobacco lobby going “Smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Nope, nope, nope, no cancer, here’s a bunch of studies we funded that prove it. But even if it DID, if you smoke it’s your own fault if you get sick.”
What I want to know from McDonald’s is, if even their upper management people know that eating McD’s every day is unhealthy, what steps are they taking to tell the public how many times a week eating there IS healthy?
The guy in the article said he eats 3 times. So is 3 times healthy? Can we get away with 4 or 5? If 21 times a week is unhealthy, where’s the cutoff?
Yeah, you’ve really gotta wonder if these people learned anything from the McLibel trial.
Plenty of people know how crappy the food is at McDonalds, and they still choose to eat there because they like the taste or the convenience. Those people look at things like the movie “Super Size Me” and have a bit of a laugh, because they know that eating nothing but McDonald’s food for a month is silly.
Similarly, regarding the McLibel trial, plenty of people know that McDonalds hiring and labor practices, and environmental practices, are seriously questionable. Yet those people often still choose to eat there.
Where McDonalds fucks up is in trying to counter these things with propaganda of its own, because the companyjust ends up looking silly at best, and like a bunch of baldfaced liars at worst. They would be better off ignoring it and letting it sink into the obscurity that is the long-term fate of even the best documentaries.
I don’t feel it’s McD’s or any other food provider’s responsibility to tell the consumer how often one could eat their food in a healthy manner. They provide nutritional information, at the website at least, and I suppose in the restaurants too (although I haven’t been to one in a while, so maybe I’m wrong). That’s enough for the consumer to make their own decision.
And even if they didn’t provide such information, we all know it’s fried beef patties. They’re not saying it’s something else. People can generally find out for themselves, if they don’t know already, that fried beef isn’t a health food
I think McDonald’s has to say something so that the anti-McDonald’s forces can’t say, “This movie came out, and the chain had NOTHING to say!” But, keeping in mind the free publicity that this gives the movie, I wouldn’t go OVERBOARD with a response.
That’s where you issue a low-key announcement saying they disagree with how they were presented in the movie and how he went way overboard, etc., post it on their website in their media section, and tada, they’ve responded.
Well, in America at least, McDonald’s responded by getting rid of the “Supersize” option, putting small and medium-sized french fries back on the menu, and nearly completely revamping and refocused their menu by offering more things like decent salads and healthier chicken sandwiches, apple slices in happy meals, etc. And, in turn, completely turning around their lagging sales…profits are up, revenue is up, and IMHO they owe a great deal of it to this movie.
I haven’t seen the documentary, but I saw the makers interview on the John Stewart show, and he reeked of BS. I don’t doubt he actually ate McDs for a month, but he started with the intention of gaining weight during the month and he succeeded. I could gain weight by eating anything in excess…
I haven’t seen the movie, so perhaps I shouldn’t be one to speak. Regardless, I wondered how, or even if, this guy’s claims were validated. 1.5 hours for a movie allows a lot room for creative editing.
I haven’t seen the movie but, based on the reviews I have read, I think the issue the film tackles is McDonald’s spending billions to represent itself to the public as a breakfast, lunch and dinner place, where you can get three squares a day. It’s selling itself as a provider of wholesome meals.
The guy essentially passively takes McDonald’s at it’s word and eats a standard breakfast, lunch and dinner McDonalds “meal”, and passively agrees everytime the McDonald’s clerk suggests “supersizing” his meal. He’s essentially the dream customer, delivering himself into the hands of McDonalds, and living the McDonalds culinary life, which McDonald’s suggests it can provide in a wholesome manner. And in doing so he becomes a bloated, unhealthy sack of suet.
Now, McDonalds comes along and says "No, no, no… you’ve got to be proactive about your own health, don’t you have enough sense not to do what we urge you to do (ie “supersize”).
In this film McDonalds is forced to confront the latent hypocrisy in acknowledging the common sense health limits of consuming a typical McDonalds calorie dense, high fat, high sugar, low fiber fast food diet, and it’s advertising representations that it is providing “healthy” meals instead of fast, hot calorie bombs.
I saw the movie today. It does make a pretty powerful statement about the toxicity of junk food.
He did a lot more than gain weight, BTW. He also poisoned his liver, got intense heaches, heart palpitations, chest pains and a plethora of other problems.
Interestingly, a lot of the problems seemed to come more from the pop and the french fries than from the burgers. The movie showed a guy who had been eating big macs every day, twice a day for years and was quite skinny. The movie also said that he never ate the fries.
There is quite a bit of valuable information in the movie. It isn’t just a stunt. McDonalds food is Satan. It’s no use defending it. The movie also made some good points about obesity in children and how so much of the food marketed to children is completely toxic and murderous.
It is stupid for McDonalds to draw ay more attention to this movie.
I haven’t seen much of the response by McD’s, but what I did see amounted to “Eating only our burgers and fries for a month makes you fat and sick? Duh!.”
McDonalds have never promoted their foods as a complete and nutrious diet in my recollection, which prompts me to ask: What exactly is the point of Supersize Me? I would say that everyone knows or should know that a varied diet is important to good health. Anyone trying to survive on fried beef, pickles, tomato sauce, bread, fried potato and possibly icecream is going to get sick. McDonald’s target customer base is people who need something to eat in a hurry and fairly cheap, not people after a solution for three meals a day.
I should note that I haven’t seen Supersize Me, so I don’t know if there’s a more significant point being made.
I get the feeling that McDonalds Australia is run a bit differently to the American version, which is why they can refute a some of the claims made in the movie. For instance no one at the McDonald’s near me has ever asked if I want to supersize anything.
The guy also ate a lot of desserts and various other things, at least thats he let slip on TDS.
This was where my BS meter really went off during the interview. Headaches and chestpains (aka heartburn) could be caused by any radical change in diet. The rest of it just did not sound belivable. Maybe if he had an EKG prior to starting and another 4 weeks in I would buy the rest of the stuff, but he was trying to convince you that he barely escaped with his life after 4 weeks- give me a break.
I think DTC’s point is buttressed by a little more than “anecdote”. It is hardly nutritional rocket science to assert that McDonald’s food is not good for you if it comprises a substantive part of your diet. Here is McD’s site. Go to the nutritional calculator and do the math. Sum the calories, fat, sodium etc., in the meal combos it offers on it’s menus, and the notion that these meals are anything but hyper rich gut bombs is difficult to sustain.
It’s not “anecdote”, it’s an empirically verfiable observation that this stuff is not good for you if made a regular and consistent part of your diet. And, lets not dance around the issue here re “You don’t have to eat these meals, you can pick and choose”. Objectively this is true, but in day to day operations these “meals” are what McDonalds focuses their advertising on selling. They, with their super high profit drink and fry components, are the profit core of the enterprise. McDonalds actually loses a tiny amount money if you went in and just ordered a plain hamburger.
Interestingly enough in the Sydney paper last week a journalist wrote a piece about the movie and the ads. She said she thought it would be better if she tried eating Macca’s 3 meals a day for a week. She lost one kilogram (2.2 pounds) in the week and put it down to the fact that she normally doesn’t eat breakfast but did while eating Macca’s.
