Posted on: Friday, June 11, 2004
'Super Size Me' documentary takes on epic proportions
By In-Sung Yoo
USA Today
Thirty days of nothing but Big Macs, french fries, sundaes and apple pies.
Sounds like every 10-year-old's culinary utopia. But for Morgan Spurlock, who spent February and March 2003, documenting 30 days of eating nothing but McDonald's, it proved to be a case of biting off more than he could stomach, let alone chew.
The filmmaker is the star/human petri dish and director of the Sundance Film Festival darling, "Super Size Me," a documentary on the fast food and the "toxic food culture" that he says has made America the fattest nation in an ever-fattening world.
A professed cheeseburger lover, Spurlock, 33, maintains he did not set out to specifically to sully the Golden Arches. He merely wanted to test the claim that their food was "nutritious," which the corporation has justified in the past on the grounds that the food has nutrients.
Taking in about 5,000 calories a day, Spurlock predictably got fat.
Perhaps not so predictable was the extent to which his health suffered, he says. All told, he packed 25 pounds of extra flab on his once-trim 6-foot-2-inch, 11 percent body fat frame. He went from 185 to 210 pounds. He also developed a toxic liver that became unable to break down any more fat, his cholesterol level shot up from 165 to a borderline high risk 225 and his sex drive fell, a victim of the relentless onslaught of Big Mac attacks, he says.
The film has generated outrage among those who have proclaimed Spurlock — with his vegan girlfriend and MTV ties — as little more than a junk-science huckster. Many have accused him of just picking on McDonald's as the easy target.
But he points out that the documentary also details at length the role of parents in monitoring their children's diets, the need for improved lunches and physical education in the nation's schools, and yes, even personal responsibility.
"People say, well is it a corporation's responsibility to educate these people?" he says. "You know what, if you feed 46 million people worldwide every single day, yes it is.
"I wanted to pick the company that, in my mind, could most easily institute change. In this business, it's follow the leader. If McDonald's starts to make some changes to their menus ... everybody else across the board is going to follow."
The changes already are under way. Burger King, Wendy's and Hardee's recently introduced new low-fat and low-carbohydrate options. Meanwhile, McDonald's is phasing out "super sizing" and today introduces Go Active adult meals complete with salad, pedometer and exercise tips. These actions, the company says, are in no way tied to the film, which opens Friday.
McDonald's officials did not respond to Spurlock's requests for an interview during the filming. They say the film is misleading and ham-handed in its arguments, and they question his claims on how his health suffered.
The film "does not provide factual information. It's a missed opportunity to actually help be part of the solution," says Cathy Kapica, McDonald's worldwide nutrition director. "I found it very disappointing in that regard."
Kelly Brownell of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders found the film to be quite the opposite.
"I thought it was very powerful, and I didn't see anything in the movie that was factually inaccurate," he says. "Nowhere in that film did I see him blame the obesity epidemic on fast food or on McDonald's. He says pretty clearly that this is just part of the picture, which is right."
Some nutritionists say that all food has a place in the human diet and that labeling foods bad or good is unnecessary. "There is no one particular food you can pinpoint and say, yeah, that is really an unhealthy thing," says Dawn Jackson of the American Dietetic Association.
"When you think about nutrition as a public health problem that affects a nation, then it becomes completely counterproductive because it makes broccoli seem like hot dogs. You can't target or blame any one food, and therefore everybody is blameless," Brownell says.
Spurlock's experiment has spawned a number of challenges by people seeking to prove that they can actually lose weight while eating only at McDonald's. Most notable is Soso Whaley, 49, an adjunct fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group. Whaley claims to have lost 10 pounds while increasing her exercise and consuming an average of 2,000 calories on a typical daily diet of one sandwich per meal.
Almost 65 percent of Americans weigh too much. An estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of kids are overweight or at risk of becoming so, according to government officials.
Most experts say neither corporations nor consumers alone created the health crisis, but it will take both to rectify it. Spurlock agrees. "It starts with a dialogue, with making some concessions, and that's where we are right now," he says. "It is a two-way street, I completely agree. But we have to meet somewhere in the middle."
