Supersizeme

[Hivetyrant]

Hmm I wish it were that simple for me, I can eat crap for a month (not real crap [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) and I will still not put on any weight

[Lucern]

I agree that a single case study doesn't do all that much to explore and explain much of anything.

For those of you interested in digging a little deeper into serious criticism of fast food (the food's creation, the culture, the business model, the history - not taste or anything silly like that), there's a book called Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser that I'd recommend to anyone. You people who read this section seem to like reading, after all


(a tiny review of it)
http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/books/schlosser.html

[Sir Goulum]

Originally posted by Grojlach: Well, he took a rather one-sided diet; nowadays McDonalds sells enough non-fat/low-carb food to compensate. In fact, I believe there was someone who actually went to eat at McDonalds for two weeks on end and ended up losing weight. <font size=0>* Not a fast food apologist, by the way. I don't think I eat more than 4 times a year at McDonalds, to be honest. </size>

Their non-fat/low-carb salads really aren't non-fat/low-carb after you add in the sauce.

[Barry the Sprout]

I hear a lot of people commenting on this movie by saying its extreme, and that no one eats as much Macdonalds as Spurlock did in this movie, but I think they're maybe missing the point somewhat.

Spurlock does give quite explicit reasons why he thinks that eating McD's all the time is a sufficient critique of them, and its not because he thinks people actually do eat like that. Its because MacDonalds markets its food as healthy, safe for kids, not harmful at all, and then as soon as someone actually acts on these guidelines and eats the food all the time MacDonalds steps away and claims no culpability. After two girls sued MacDonald's for making them fat the judge claimed that they would win if it could be proven eating MacDonald's all the time would be unhealthy - thats why Spurlock embarked on this suicidal endeavour.

The movie is as much about the way MacDonald's, and other fast food companies, position themselves in society as it is about the food they sell. They bombard us with adverts about the virtues of their food which fail to mention what they oh-so-reasonably point out afterwards; that of course you're not supposed to eat the food all the time.... whatever made you think we wanted you to do something crazy like that?!? Was it the wall to wall advertising? The failure to display nutritional information? The positioning of the food as appealing to kids? So on, and so on. All factors that make it a little hard to take them seriously when they start telling fat people that they had nothing to do with it. They're one short step away from actually saying "Look, we didn't actually expect you to believe all that BS from the ads..."

Spurlock is going after a much bigger issue than just MadDonalds here, and the backlash against him is often quite misplaced, in my opinion.

[Rataxes]

Not saying McDonalds make healthy food, but it wasn't the quality of their food that caused Spurlock to nearly eat himself to death. Living on mainly saturated fats and fast carbs for a month doesn't do that to you, many people live like that for decades before they eventually clog their veins and die.

The thing that really devastated him was the vast amounts he ate (which I admit is also mainly McDonalds fault for serving grossly oversized portions). Someone said he gained 16 pounds in 12 days, which probably amounts to at least 3000 calories above his base energy need per day. If I ate that much energy for a few weeks I'd probably feel as bad as Spurlock regardless of whether that energy came from McDonalds or from fruits, nuts and fish.

[ 04-12-2005, 01:40 PM: Message edited by: Rataxes ]

[Thoran]

Barry IMO it isn't with the point he was trying to make that's the problem, it's that he was advocating not documenting. He did things (like eating FAR more of the food than he should have been and doing almost NOTHING to get any exercise) not to determine if McDonalds food was healthy or not... but rather to achieve a pre-determined result - to get fat, unhealthy and get a spectacular result (which would insure him sales, money, publicity, etc...)

He had a vested interest in making sure he got unhealthy, so as a critique of McDonalds IMO that show was basically useless. As a discussion of our bad habits I think it has value. As Rataxes said, eat that many calories a day of ANYTHING and you'll be very unhealthy very quickly. Add to that that the guy was basically a vegan and I think you end up with a nasty shock to a system not used to eating that sort of diet.

[Mack_Attack]

Ok the fact that he did not excercise. He was trying to be like tha average person. He did some research on what the average person does for activity. This is what he also did. And the real reason that he did what he did is because of what Mac D's said in the law suit that was against them. It boiled down to the fact that they said that there food would not harm you. And yes barry you did state this already. I am just trying to keep people onto the real reason for him doing this.

Was it over the top maybe so. But it was mac d's that threw the first punch.

Lets face it we are a nation of fat people.

[Harkoliar]

Originally posted by Grojlach: Well, he took a rather one-sided diet; nowadays McDonalds sells enough non-fat/low-carb food to compensate. In fact, I believe there was someone who actually went to eat at McDonalds for two weeks on end and ended up losing weight. <font size=0>* Not a fast food apologist, by the way. I don't think I eat more than 4 times a year at McDonalds, to be honest. </size>

i thought because of supersize me McDonalds started selling low carb food in teh first place?

[Mack_Attack]

Just go ahead and read Sir G post and then all will be clear. Yes there low cal stuff is not that low cal.

[Barry the Sprout]

The fact that he had a vested interest did not make their food unhealthy - the large quantities of fat and sugar did that! Of course he has an agenda against them, why else would he have committed himself to doing this to his body in the first place, but simply pointing that out doesn't make anything that happened in the documentary fictional. He ate their food every day, as the judge he quoted said McD's clearly wanted people to do, and utterly trashed his body in the process.

And as Mack_Attack suggests, this is a lot wider than just MacDonalds - its about a nation of fat people (and us in the UK aren't far behind if recent reports are anything to go by). He uses the documentary as a setting from which to examine the whole fast food culture, not to just see what happens when you eat their food for a month. We all know what happens when you eat their food for a month - the cutting stuff of the documentary comes in how McD's market themselves and whether the fact that they're so unhealthy can continue to be plausibly considered to be the fat peoples fault.