Questions About "Supersize me"

I watched this last night-I get the impression that a lot was left out of this 'documentary". Firts: could you really get that sick (incipient liver failure ) from 21 days of eating Big Macs? And, could anyone actually stand eating nothing but McDonalds for 31 days? (I would be sick to my styomach). Anybody know how much of this was true? or was this mainly anti-fastfood propaganda?

I’m all for Mickey-D bashing, but I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy this film. A lot of the logic in the movie left me scratching my head. I blocked most of it out, but there’s one part (near the end, if I recall correctly) where he spouts out various numbers to describe how evil McDonald’s is, and ends up implying that a big mac is healthier meal than a salad. (Or something like that.)

Well, at one point he does get sick to his stomach. It was actually pretty close to the beginning, from what I remember. I guess he became accustomed to it. But remember, it’s not just the eating of McDonalds; he also walks less and in general moves less as well. It was basically a combination of poor diet and little to no exercise that did him in.

IIRC this tool was gorging himself four times daily, getting fried pies and sundaes in addition to his triple Big Macs and erection sized fries. He had to be eating 5000 calories day at least. Eating 5000 calories a day of apples is going to be bad for you.

He also doesn’t discuss that he was previously a vegitarian (or living a mostly vege lifestyle), then switched to processed, meat laden food “overnight.”

It was amusing, but not realistic. I don’t think anyone expects to eat all of their meals at McDonalds, or that it’s wise, or realistic.

A nice slug of burbon is a good thing. 3 meals a day for a month of burbon would be very very bad. Same basic deal, except that I’d feel better after 3 days of McD’s than 3 days of Jimmy Beam.

I like his 30 Days show on FX, even with his clear liberal bend.

One thing that DID it me-the people working at all of the McD’s he visited were HUGE! That poor girl at the McDonald’s in Dallas looked like she weighed at least 250 lbs! I’m of two minds about fast food: one, it is unhealthy to eat a lot of it, but two, people have the right to make their own choices. Personally, I can’t stand the grease -McD’s fries seem to be soaked in it. The only thing I like is BK’s plain chili- a little of that once in a while should be OK.

I can’t see liver damage happening that quickly. But, you never know. :dubious:

Next, he forced himself to overeat, often choosing the worst and largest tiems on the menu. His “experiment” has been re-done at least five times and all five lost weight. Super Size Me - Wikipedia

In other words, it wasn’t McD’s so much as your choices. I have little doubt that by going into your local health food restaurant, and eating hwaaaaay too much of just the worst items on the menu, you could dupilcate Spurlocks stunt.

It also seems he deliberately choose the heaviest and worst looking McD’s workers. Around here, I find most of the workers at McDs to be young, female and cute.

Thats not exactly true. The salad choices weren’t available when Spurlock made Supersize Me. And the 5 other experiments if you can call them that, didn’t try to duplicate what Spurlock did, they intentionally tried to lose weight.

Seriously, who couldn’t lose weight if they tried eating at McDonald’s if you used portion control and limited calories? The problem is no one eats that way, especially kids. Take his weight out of the equation. Didn’t you have a problem with school lunches that he addressed?

There might be a couple cute little 15 year old kids working at McDonald’s, but I don’t think he had to look far to find some overweight kids or had to seek them out. Take a look around you. Sit outside of a school sometime and watch the kids come out. It is a problem.

True but he intentionally tried to gain weight, so? Yes, the new line of salads weren’t out, but there were salads, IIRC, and certainly better choices.

Like I said, right now I could go across the street to the vegetarian salad bad place, and eat *there * 3 meals a day for a month and get just as sick & as fat. Say a plate of cheese and eggs, covered with Mayo-based salad dressing. Nuts as a garni. :eek: And, it’s been proved you could eat 3X a day at McD’s and lose weight and be healthy.

Don’t get me wrong, a meal of a “triple-cheburger with a pound of fries, washed down with a large cola” is something that should be injested only rarely, and certainly not as a “normal meal”. But it’s *not * McD’s or BK, or JitB, or even “Alices Vegan Palace”- it’s what *you choose * to eat at those.

I don’t remember gaining weight being his stated purpose. I thought his only rules were that he had to try everything on the menu at least once (I think he cycled through the entire menu 2 or 3 times in 30 days) and that if anyone offered to super-size anything, he had to say yes (in fact, few did).

That was pretty much the point of the movie.

He made no attempt to weight his choices by weight-gain/-loss criteria. His only criteria, as pointed out above, were that he must work his way through the entire menu, and–though he would not ask for it (thus blowing the “he intentionally tried to gain weight” theory)–he would say yes whenever a supersize was offered by the cashier. None of the meals that he ordered in the film were in any way out of the ordinary; they were exactly the kind of meals you see people order at McDonald’s every day.

And the fact that he experienced major health problems was never used to suggest, as many people in this thread seem to believe, that such a thing would happen universally, to everyone who ate this way. He even spent some time, in the movie, with a guy who had eaten a Big Mac every day for, what, years, with no apparent health effects.

I think that people who have a problem with Supersize Me’s “agenda” believe, like Stephen Colbert, that reality has a well-known liberal bias. It’s a remarkably balanced documentary. Just because the conclusions to be drawn are obvious don’t make them faked.

I disagree, Howie: it’s pretty obvious that the point of the movie was “McDonalds is bad, m-kay?”, not “People choose the wrong things to eat at McDonalds.”

I’m not doubting you, I just don’t see how this is possible. I don’t think it’s healthy to give kids a diet of fast food or processed foods at schools. It’s possible to gain weight at a health food salad place if you consume too many calories of course. I have a hard time believing that it would be as unhealthy as consuming the vast amout of sugar, fats, salts and chemicals that are in most of the food at fast food restaurants.

The point of the movie was, “Hmm. *Is *McDonald’s really as bad some people say? Let’s find out.”

(my italics)

Note the word “most”. Did ya read the cite I gave? No less than FIVE other dudes did the same thing and lost weight. Just becuase it is “fast food or processed food” doesn’t mean it’s bad for you. "100% natural and raw- unprocessed " can be BAD for you also.

The vegetarian salad bar place acroos the street- with it’s 100% Organic, *is * “fast food” too you know.

Sure, it’s easier to make bad food choices at a burger joint, and easier to make good food choices at a “100% Organic Vegetarian salad bar”. But still it’s the *choices * you make.

Er… no, again. The point of the movie was “McDonalds* is bad, m’kay?”

It was quite obvious that that there was no true “research” in this film - you could hardly call the film an exercise in the Scientific Method: he wasn’t trying to test a hypothesis using non-biasing questions and techniques, he was trying to prove a point and therefore framed the movie (and his test) to get the results he wanted.

*And, by extension, all other fast-food places.

I think one of the things that wasn’t said outright but was hinted at a number of times in the movie is that the filmmaker seemed to be quite a healthy-living advocate long before he got the idea to do the film. My first viewing of the film was with my sister and her husband* and during the scenes with the doctor, when he was discussing his pre-McDonalds “measurements” (blood tests, etc), my sister said “Hell, he’s healthier than I am. Why is he doing this?”

So when the filmmaker would say such things as “My cholesterol level (for example) increased X%!” note that he started at a much-lower level than the average person so the increases themselves were skewed.

*Both 20-year doctors w/o an ounce of fat on them who run marathons and bike over mountain ranges for fun. Rebecca might weigh 105 pounds.

I thought he made the movie as a response to the lawsuits filed against McD’s by several teenage kids who had gained weight and had health problems as a result of eating most of their meals there.
It’s mentioned in the beginning of the film - a group of teenage kids (IIRC, I think they were all girls) were very obese and had health problems. Some sleazy lawyer jumped all over it and tried to sue McDonald’s, since the girls ate nearly all their meals there. I think it was thrown out of court.

And yes, as others have said, he had to cycle through everything on the menu, and could only supersize it when asked, which only happened a few times. Not every time.
At the time, McD’s only had those little salad shaker things. The big salads they have now are actually pretty tasty, but I’m sure they have as many calories as a Big Mac, when you factor in the chicken, cheese and dressing.

I think I see what the problem is here. I was talking about the Supersize Me that’s a documentary by Morgan Spurlock, where he enlists the services of a doctor and a nutritionist, who are the parties to actually compute and analyze the data produced by the experiment. I’m not actually sure what movie you’re talking about.

In the *Supersize Me *that’s the subject of this thread, the results surprised everyone, including the doctor, and including Spurlock.