His famous “documentary,” Super Size Me, turned out to be bogus. Spurlock never released his food diary, preventing precise fact-checking. Researchers following his general guidelines were unable to duplicate his results, and for a good reason. While he claimed to have lived entirely on McDonald’s food, he failed to mention that he was also consuming large amounts of alcohol at the time.
So nobody should be surprised that you can get fat and unhealthy by eating vast amounts of food, while drinking sugary soft drinks, milk shakes and booze. The fact that it was McDonald’s food is almost irrelevant to the experiment.
Other researchers, duplicating Spurlock’s food regimen as closely as possible, but drinking no milk shakes and substituting diet soft drinks or water for regular soft drinks, actually lost weight and improved their cholesterol numbers!
Spurlock went on to other projects but whatever fame he achieved was a result of Super Size Me.
In an early scene in “Super Size Me,” Spurlock eats his first McDonald’s meal, then leans out of the car and pukes it up. That’s when I started to suspect I was seeing a dramatically enhanced tale.
I never watched Super Size Me because the entire premise was stupid. Just because McDonald’s offers unhealthy meal options on its menu doesn’t mean you have to order them. Just because they ask you if you would like your order supersized doesn’t mean you have to say yes. McDonald’s actually has healthy meal options. For instance, you can order a grilled chicken salad. You can also order a diet soda, coffee, or tea instead of a milkshake. About the time Super Size Me came out, an attorney in the Bronx filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s on behalf of several obese children. The kids were interviewed on the news and said they ate lunch and dinner at McDonald’s almost every day. One very round 12-year-old said he liked to super-size his meals. Exactly what duty of care did McDonald’s violate? Is it like the rule that bartenders aren’t allowed to serve obviously intoxicated people? Should McDonald’s employees be trained to refuse to serve all obese customers or just obese children? Can you imagine the PR disaster if a McDonald’s employee refused to serve a woman because they thought she was too fat? The kids should be suing their parent(s) for feeding them super-sized McDonald’s burgers and fries twice a day every day. I could stand to lose 80 lbs, but the only person responsible for my being overweight is me. Well, me and the driver of the garbage truck that rear-ended me while I was stopped at a red light. My bad back makes it much harder to get enough exercise. Then again, it would be possible for me to get more exercise, but I probably use my back pain as an excuse to sit on the couch all day. Regardless, McDonald’s is certainly not responsible because they sold me an extra large fries and a vanilla milkshake.
But just because I disliked the premise of his movie doesn’t mean he deserved to die of cancer at such a young age. My condolences to his two children and the rest of his family.
Ive gotten a stomach bug every time after ordering their grilled chicken salad…no matter the location…not healthy for me.
I also sort of doubt this “Other researchers, duplicating Spurlock’s food regimen as closely as possible, but drinking no milk shakes and substituting diet soft drinks or water for regular soft drinks, actually lost weight and improved their cholesterol numbers!”…. if you ate two big macs, two regular fries and an two egg mcmuffins and zero calories from beverages a day, it would be hard to not gain weight.
Assuming you eat only one egg muffin for breakfast instead of two, it would be 1950 calories, That sounds pretty safe if you get a healthy amount of exercise.
You can get it lower if you eat the Big Macs without the sauce, which makes them 468 calories apiece. The fries are 230 apiece, and the Egg McMuffins are 310, If you have an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, a Big Mac without sauce plus fries for lunch, and again for dinner, that would be 1706 calories, so you should drop weight unless you are built like Ariana Grande.
I could lose a ton of weight on this diet because I hate french fries, so I’d scrap them and put the sauce back on the Big Macs. One Egg McMuffin plus two hi-test Big Macs (WITH the sauce) would be 1490 calories a day. I would not like that diet, but it would work.
Of course, none of that includes the infamous super-sizing.
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One illustration:
Meet the science teacher who lost 60 pounds eating nothing but McDonald’s three meals a day. He ate french fries every day for six months, but was otherwise sensible, keeping his daily caloric consumption below 2000.
… How can you hate French Fries? You know that they’re really from Belgium, right?
If you tell people you’re into “Belgian cuisine,” they’ll assume you mean Brussels sprouts. No one needs to know the truth.
I have never developed a taste for anything salty. I haven’t had a French fry or any potato chips in decades. Thank God for that because I love every other kind of garbage food.
Is it OK to call them French fries now instead of freedom fries.
Is Larry Bird still the hick from Freedom Lick?
He started losing weight, so he took measures to make himself unhealthy. Like stopping exercise and walking less. Plus, he was an alcoholic so he was drinking all throughout the movie. He basically skewed the results to get the narrative he wanted.
He was ahead of his time. Truly a visionary, he paved the way for modern journalism.
Not to mention modern “reality” shows.
A major point was that, to his surprise, he developed liver issues
Less of a surprise now, I guess
This is, no doubt, another example of why you don’t care for documentaries. Filmmakers skewing facts, not presenting everything in proper context, and influencing the masses despite the information being incorrect.
Classic case of people confusing two things.
McDonald’s isn’t fattening. They offer poor nutrition. Non-nutritious “junk” food doesn’t make you fat, it makes you lethargic,
I should know, for the past couple of years I’ve been dirt poor and surviving on McD’s ramen, etc. Malnutrition will make you lose weight, feel awful, and be tired all the time.
Now that I have a new job and am eating better, I’ve got more energy.
Some interesting Spurlock stuff here … though they are pretty credulous about Super Size Me. For instance: down for the dirt nap at *53*. Somehow in the back of my mind, I thought he was older than me.