Reply With QuoteYeah, that movie has potentially put me off McDonald's for life.
This is a movie, but it is a political movie so I'll post it here. Who has seen this flick? If you haven't, go rent it. Like, now.
I only regret that I had my normal "celebrate the end of the week" Taco Bell a few hours before eating it. Man, by the end of the movie I was wishing I could go back in time, say 30 years to when I was two months old, and brand my own baby ass with a "NO FAST FOOD" sign. I was practically cheering for the people who sued the fast food restaurants (although I'm completely against lawsuits like it).
And I mean, it isn't that I don't know these things about how bad fast food is for you, but I was as floored by the doctors in the movie about how quickly and how systemically homeboy's body started going nuts. Here he was in excellent health, his g/f was hardcore vegan so while he ate meat he had a generally healthy diet, he didn't smoke or drink or anything. Tune in 30 days later and he gained like 35 pounds, plus not only things we commoners know about such as cholesterol went through the roof, but also his liver was "leeching out" excess fats and he had other blood indicators going everywhere... fucking crazy.
Anyways just wanted to get that off my chest.
Yeah, that movie has potentially put me off McDonald's for life.
I'm already put off McDonald's for life, so I don't really need to see it. And it actually has nothing to do with having worked there. Well, that might be part of it, but not in an omg disgusting way.
Yep, I've eaten fast food like twice since seeing that film quite some time ago, and both times were because I was on a road trip and it was my only convenient option. There's still plenty of problems with my diet, but fast food isn't one of them any more.
Shift6, if you haven't already, make sure you watch the DVD extras. Specifically, watch the one where they put like 6 different kinds of food in glass jars and leave them for weeks to rot. The "home made" burgers and fries from a real restaurant rot quickly like you would expect them to. The fast food burgers, presumably because of the preservatives, take longer, but the real horror story is the McDonald's french fries. They NEVER DECOMPOSE. They look almost the same at day 30 as they did on day 2. It's just totally unnatural.
That movie is silly overblown nonsense. Even tho ive seen it happen a million times it still amazing me when people get all excited over pointless hyperbole. Really now be honest how many of you actualy thought eating greesy nasty MickyDs for a solid month would be good for you? i dont know about you guys but ive always known food like that is bad if you over do it. id bet you guys knew the same long before this idiot tried to kill him self with Mcdonalds. I damn sure did not need this wacko to tell me that moderation in good.
You sort of missed the point.Originally Posted by AttAdude
The month-at-MacDonald's was just the hook to get people in the door. If you focus on his discomfort - which, remember, surprised even the medical professionals who examined him - you miss all the important stuff about marketing, food production, chemicals and the like.
The message was not "moderation is good". It was "Why does our culture have this fetish for food that is neither good nor good for you?"
It hasn't stopped me from eating fast food. I have a mostly balanced diet and love cheeseburgers. But I didn't confuse the stunt with the message.
Troy
Yeah, I'm pissed off at Super Size Me, too!!!
Wait, no I'm not. It was entertaining. And as shift6 said, it's a political movie.
I just saw it a couple of days ago. It's a great movie; very entertaining and informative. I don't eat fast food very often as it is, and I may stop completely now :o
Unfortunately, the people who need to see it most (those McDonalds apparantly terms their "Heavy Users" and "Super Heavy Users", I kid you not), are unlikely to ever see it.
You guys need to watch a movie to know not to eat fast food?
No, but it's good to watch a movie to know what it's actually about.
Well, I'll bet nobody thought it could have quite such a profound effect. I certainly didn't, going into the film His GP (family doc) told him at the beginning that it probably wouldn't do him any good, but it wouldn't fundamentally hurt him, and the other experts he went to were of the same opinion. The scaredom comes when these experts slowly drop off the radar as the movie goes on (this might be creative editing, I don't know), and then it's only his own Doctor left, aghast, telling him his liver is being turned to paté and meaning it. I don't think it's pointless hyperbole, because Morgan risked taking years off his life in order to make the point.
If there is any pointless hyperbole in the film, it's all over fairly near the beginning when he eats the Super Size meal in the car, and bowks it out the window.
It's amazing what some people don't know.You guys need to watch a movie to know not to eat fast food?
I used to work in a Thai/Caribbean fusion resturant in Brooklyn, NYC. One night the Chef and I closed the resturant and went to a bar down the street, where the Chef started to chat up some woman there. She started to complain that she was hungry, and she asked if he would take her to McDonalds. Chef refused, stating how McDonalds food was some of the worst food for you. She responded, " C'mon. Micky Dee's aint never killed nobody. How is it bad for you?"
Stunned and speechless, Chef shook his head.
The amount of people who don't know it's bad for you seriously outnumber those who do.
Funk.
It stopped me from eating fast food also. It actually got me to take a hard look not only at my own diet, but my sons. It isn't just about fast food, but 90% of everything sold to us in supermarkets and other resturants. When did it become common in every single resturaunt to give kids chicken fingers and fries? Remember when you at the same food as adults? I do. Hell I remember eating soft shell crab as young as 6 years old.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I have noticed more overweight people in the past ten years, especially kids, then when I was a youngin. I can only remember two really overweight kids from my grammar school class, now it is closer to 50% of them.
Even in my Dojo the number of people that are fatasses shocks me. At least they are attempting to do something about it.
I was starting to develop the 30 something pot belly, and no not from too much beer, but from lack of good food and no physical exersize. My weight has actually gone up - from 160 to 172, but I'm thinner now then a year ago.The pot belly has been replaced with an almost wasboard, it is hard to get rid of than you might think, but I'm almost there. More energy, better tasting food, and less headaches, tummyaches and general blahs.
It isn't the time sink that people think, I spend 15 minutes in the morning and 30 at night, and two days of hardcore 4 hour psycho workouts/sparring/bag work exc.
I also quit smoking- mostly- at the same time and if you told me I could run 5 miles without coughing up a lung a year later I would have told you that you are nuts.
You'd be shocked not only at what the general public doesn't know about fast food (calorie counts vs real foods -- a single Big Mac meal with fries and a coke has more calories than I eat in a normal day), but about regular foods as well.
Read about what trans-fats do to your body, then look at the number of products that have them on your shelves.
I once saw a demonstration of how much sugar was in a Big Gulp soft drink -- it was on the order of eight ounces. Very visually disturbing.
I still like all the crappy foods, but having lost over 40 pounds and finding myself feeling about 3x as energetic as I was four months ago, I'm definitely going to approach them with caution, and only rarely, in the future.
Kudos to Super-Size Me for bringing this to public attention. I expect a bit of hyperbole in mass entertainmnet, but his point is right on.
No i got that too, but i would not call it the movies point. Its a theme but since he never actualy answers the question, i have trouble saying its the point of the movie esp since its a political movie whos purpose is to sell you a message. I also got the lets have a witch hunt on Mcdonalds point as well. Its the same ol same ol we always get from silly people here in america. It cant be my fault im fat and sick no way. Some how its Mcdonalds fault that people in this country can not budget thier time enough to eat good and its McDonalds fault that people in this country dont understand the concept of moderation in regards to food. Mcdonalds offeres a service and people use it. if they use it to much that is the fault of the customer. This movie seemed to want to transfer blame too much for my tastes. Its up to people to police them selves or shut the hell up. Fact is McDonalds would not be there at all if it was not what the american people want. Mcdonalds survived this movie not because its good food or good politics they survived because average americans dont give a shit about thier weight and well being. If the reverse was true there would be no need for lawsuits or silly overblown movies like this. Mcdonalds would just go out of buisness.You sort of missed the point.
The month-at-MacDonald's was just the hook to get people in the door. If you focus on his discomfort - which, remember, surprised even the medical professionals who examined him - you miss all the important stuff about marketing, food production, chemicals and the like.
The message was not "moderation is good". It was "Why does our culture have this fetish for food that is neither good nor good for you?"
It hasn't stopped me from eating fast food. I have a mostly balanced diet and love cheeseburgers. But I didn't confuse the stunt with the message.
Troy
One last point. The whole point of the movie is invalid anyway. The bulk of the proof for the points in this movie is fallicious to start with. His example is so overblown and so far out of the ordinary that it really has no bearing at all on the topic it presents.
I give you the Fallicy of Misleading Vividness. This is a fallacy in which a very small number of particularly dramatic events are taken to outweigh a significant amount of statistical evidence. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:
1. Dramatic or vivid event X occurs (and is not in accord with the majority of the statistical evidence) .
2. Therefore events of type X are likely to occur.
By the way i disagree with you Mcdonalds food is yummy /shurg.
That chef is a hero, he saved that woman's life!
What surprised me so much watching the documentary was the change in his mental state and his sexual performance (as described by his lady). We all tend to fixate on the physical results, particularly the waistline, but like Steve mentioned feeling energetic, feeling good mentally (and I'm not talking just an improved self-esteem), can be more important. I recently (well, from 2001 to 2004) went from basically 300 lbs down to slightly under 195 through sheer grit at the gym. There was no dieting per se, just a sort of educational process through which I cut out all fast food, a helluva lot of processed crap, killed my 6-pack of soda/day habit, and generally learned to better balance my carbs with healthy protein sources. I still have a sort of 'cheat day' once a week, during which the wife and I'll snack on junk food and/or order a pizza or get chinese take-out, but that's more for the mental aspect of knowing that it's OK to have these things once in a while and not feel like I'm totally depriving myself of all sweets.
But, yeah, Super Size Me strongly reinforced the need to avoid my former bad habits that saw me go from a high school graduate who weighed 165 lbs to a married, mid-30s deskjockey porking out at around 300 lbs.
I completely agree with Attadude. Super Size Me was polemical nonsense. Yeah, sure, entertaining and all, but ultimately junk science at its hysterical worst.
If you abuse your body, you're going to get sick, whether you do it with McDonalds, Trader Joes, or wheat grass. Spurlock refused to do anything to balance his diet and consciously introduced a shock to his system by going from a healthy vegan diet to nothing buy burgers, fries, and sodas three times a day. It's hardly a newsflash that you're going to feel like crap if you do that. And if you eat nothing but that for months on end, you don't need a doctor to tell you it's not good for you.
What's worse, the movie implies all sort of connections without establishing causation. I love the fact that he interviews his own wife, who complains that he's not performing as well sexually. Well, no duh, the guy has been filming a documentary for the last thirty days, travellling around the country, interviewing people, and eating junk food.
I feel similarly about Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a book that also makes tenous connections without establishing causation. My favorite was the one where the author suggested a cattle rancher had killed himself because of the big beef industry.
I hardly think it's news that fast food is a big business. It's also not healthy as a consistent diet. But it's convenient and it won't kill you if you avail yourself of its advantages from time to time. At least no more so than any ol' crappy processed food.
-Tom
One point that i would like claified is just how much of a role his vegan diet played in this movie. I know several vegetarians around 15 or so in all. Those that have been doing it for for several years all unanimously claim that after doing thier thing for a while they could not go back because meat in general regardless of quality would make them sick. Im sure thats a short term effect of the change in diet and what not, but i wonder if it exacerbated Spurlock's bio responses to his 30 day binge. Id be willing to bet that for a person like me who eats McDonalds at least 2-3 times a week the reaction would be lessened or minimal. Of course it would make me fat and what not, i dont doubt that a bit, but im talking about the mental dulling, and general health complaints he developed in the course of the doc. Spurlock took that one step further and went from a diet consisting of no animal products what so ever to one thats mainstay was meat.
In anycase it must be noted that this guy did not go from normal to Mcdonalds madness. he went from one extreme to another and did it all at once. I dont care if it was McDonalds or the Cracker Barrel going from vegan to a meat and potatos diet is gonna fuck your system up.
I don't remember him being a vegetarian before, though he probably did eat less meat than the average person.
Looks like you and Tom both missed the part where, before he starts the McDonald's diet, he argues with his fiancee about eating meat, because she is a vegan, and he is not.
The movie quietly dodges the issue, but you can infer it from the fact that his live-in girlfriend was a hardcore vegan cook who probably prepared the meals in their house.
-Tom
I once stopped eating beef and other red meat for about six months. Not for any particular health or ideological reasons; I just wanted a change in my diet. I felt physically sick the first time I ate a piece of beef after that. Not because I didn't like the taste or felt nauseated; my body just had a hell of a time digesting the meat.
It doesn't actually dodge it; they spend a solid 3-4 minutes arguing about it (recall Morgan's line "ham is the best thing ever"). Perhaps you were picking up some McNuggets during that scene ;).
The point is that the movie doesn't address how dramatically he was changing his diet. He may not have been a vegan, but if he lived with a hardcore vegan chef who was preparing his meals, you can bet it affected his diet. I lived with a girl who was allergic to sugar for a year and it sure as hell changed what I ate.
So, yeah, anyone going from his lifestyle to McDonalds three times a day -- and making a point to studiously avoid their salads as well as gorging himself on more than he'd normally eat -- is going to feel like crap.
So, what the hell, let's make a movie about it as a way to slam corporate culture and imply all sorts of causation!
-Tom
No, the endocrinologist (Indian chick) and the cardiologist (old white guy) were included at the end. So was the hot sweater-with-pointy-boobies chick (the dietician) and the skinny nerdy 25 year old (exercise-ologist) who worked in the place where they did his blood tests; the place with the gay name: Haelth with that snooty "ae" bulshit, heheh. But they definitely focused on the GP who was amazed at how much damage had been done to the whole system on the diet.
In fairness, he did point out a completely opposite anecdote to counter his own. In particular, the "Big Mac guy" who had eaten something like 2-3 a day for years. The movie profiled him when he ate his 18,000th Big Mac at in the final credits (on the DVD) mentioned his count was then like 18,700 or so. By presenting both sides he is clearly not using a "my anecdote is always 100% truth" fallacy.
It was just a case study Tom. Social scientists use case studies all the time to explore wide-ranging and complex issues. It doesn't make it junk science. And being polemical doesn't invalidate it; in fact it's the kind of thing you'd expect from a documentary first shown at Sundance. I seem to recall one of your heroes does similarly on his documenta... uh, I mean "movies'.
No, he wasn't vegan.
I think the point wasn't to show that it was bad, but to show how bad it is and how quickly it gets that way. While it is probably true that hardly anyone eats McD's three times a day, I guarantee you there are plenty of people who eat fast food twice a day even if from differing restaurants. And he emulated the lifestyle guidelines given him by the editor of a walking magazine by insuring he walked less than 1.5 miles or so a day.
He travelled once, for about three days, to Texas. Oh and he went between NY and DC right near the end and I'm guessing that interviewing regular people isn't as taxing as you might think. And they interviewed her about the sex about halfway through.
So yeah, the story was about how his performance in many areas degraded after two weeks of a shitty fast food diet and no appreciable exercise. Oh wait, that was the whole point of the film!
The stats that he consistantly gave during the film agree with that. Even almost half of the nutritionists they called said infrequent fast food is OK.
I guess I'm trying to figure out what you disliked so much about it. Clearly not everyone is as enlightened as you/we are concerning fast food so what's the problem with him presenting it?
False. He regularly ate meat before. Did you see the movie Koont... uh, I mean atTaTuDE (or however you spell it)?
Yeah it's hard to see how a viewer could forget her screed comparing ham to heroin. Or in the credits it says he was on a vegan diet for 8 weeks to get his body back to normal at the end, which causes me to infer that he was no longer on a vegan diet after that.
Tom- He points out briefly all the processed foods stuff too. But let me tell you, having a kid they pull you to the places through your child. Danamals, McD's, Chuckie Cheese exc, all are sponsors for PBS kiddie programming. They don't give a shit about my kid learning, but getting little joe in the front door and hooked on their crap. And if you don't think high carbs and sugar are addictive...I personally was dreaming about Coca Cola when I stopped drinking it. And I still miss it...
As usual people expect the whole thing layed out in a movie/book, instead of excepting it as opening an issue to have some conversation about. Look our basic diet in America sucks, from the fast food, to going to resturaunts and having servings double or triple the size they should be...and with that 'clean your plate' mentality stuck in our noggins from the time we are children.
My favorite part is the scene where the guy is talking about the fat guy giving the smoker shit. Hey smoking is the big taboo , but being out of shape and the size of half the Dallas Cowboy O line is A-ok.
Are you correlation or causation? I keep getting confused since you guys look so much alike. Never mind, let's just charge ahead.
Look, I'm all for people being more conscious about their diets. I'm also well aware that fast food is a huge industry, driven by the same considerations as other huge industries. Duh on both counts.
So props to Spurlock's Super Size Me and Schlosser's Fast Food Nation for overstating the issue to inform people of what should be pretty self-evident. But they're both full of scare tactics, half-truths, and exaggerations clearly meant to imply causation. They're both sloppy drama queens.
Listening to you guys moan about 'OMG, I'll nevar eat teh fast food again!' after seeing Super Size Me just reminded me how overblown I thought it was.
The contrast to Farenheit 9/11 is a good one. However, Farenheit 9/11 isn't hiding behind the veil of some vaguely scientific proceeding. It's an emotional movie, about moral and political issues, clearly presented as a polemic. It was the cinematic equivalent of an editorial about an issue I already agreed with. Super Size Me, on the other hand, is the cinematic equivalent of a half-assed news story where the reporter isn't quite clear about the science he's reporting on and couldn't care less so long as he got readers.
-Tom
I'm in the "entertaining nonsense" camp here, with a heavier lean on the entertaining than the nonsense. The man more or less doubled his usual daily caloric load, while seriously slashing his usual daily calorie output. None of the results of that were particularly shocking, and that includes the angst about his liver increasingly staggering about.
Movie also undermined by the bit part about that Mr. Big Mac guy, who eats almost nothing but for decades, and has needle-at-the-minimum-side-of-the-gauge cholesterol level from it.
The extra about the food rotting in jars was great; that definitely should have been part of the flick proper.
Not that they aren't addicting, but I'd tend to think that if you gave up anything you regularly consumed, you'd be dreaming about it.
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