Morgan Spurlock has died | Hacker News Reader

Morgan Spurlock has died

theguardian.com

129 pointsbookofjoe226 comments

If you haven’t seen it, I highly rate his other film ‘The greatest movie ever sold’

In it he reveals the way movies use paid product placement, by making a movie that is itself funded by product placement. It is delightfully meta.

There’s a great scene where he’s on the phone to I think a shampoo marketing department exec and they say ‘so how will this work exactly?’ And he says ‘well it will probably start with this conversation in the movie, and then we’ll cut to some kind of scene with your product in it’ and then they cut to a horse being washed with their shampoo.

Warning: You won’t watch another movie again without noticing ALL the product placement.

You can also watch Josie and the Pussycats from a decade earlier.

Mane N Tail is a pretty good bang for the bang for the buck shampoo.

They painted an entire mural at my high school for this movie so it does hit a bit closer to home.

I liked him featuring OkGo in that film, since the vast majority of their music videos are product placement or other advertising.

That's too bad. Seemed like a creative, troubled, self-motivated guy with good intentions. A hustler in the good sense of the word.

I did not know him, but was in meetings with him as part of a project. I found him nicer than he had to be to a random software dope. He was polite, perceptive, and open to input. Condolences to his family.

Nice to hear a different take than criticisms of SuperSize Me and his alcoholism. While SSM was definitely sensationalism, it did bring about a cultural awareness and changes in fast food menu.

Cynically those changes were just a rebrand to meet changing mores about health. McDonald's salad famously has more calories than the big mac. Super size items may not be called super sized, but an extra-large is the same size a super sized item. The obesity epidemic rages on and has continued to worsen in the US and has spread to pretty much every developed country. Not that I fault Spurlock for any of that, just a disappointing outcome to say the least.

In Canada and other places, we just don't have most of those sizes; supersize was replaced with nothing afaik. Fast food places do still try and trick you into thinking a massive soda with your burger is somehow worth the combo price.

We metaphorically cut one head off the hydra when the root cause is various government subsidies (or lack thereof for healthier foods). And then as you say, thst head grew back disguised as new buzzwords.

Stuff is a bit better for gen alpha in school, but there's still a lot of work to do.

No the root cause is that Americans continue to be indifferent to eating crap. As long as it is sweet or salty, packs a ton of calories and has some semblance of food in it, theres money to be made from it. It doesn't help that how much money can be made is one of the main yardsticks of worthiness in this culture often superceding common sense.

Sure, the root root cause is Apathy, like many other factors. But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country. Americans maybe have more food coming in (or grown domestically), but I'd be surprised if the gap (if any) was that large.

So I think finding the root cause one level up is still worthwhile.

> It doesn't help that how much money can be made is one of the main yardsticks of worthiness in this culture often superceding common sense.

This portion is interesting, but contradictory to the statistics. It's actually lower class citizens who have higher obesity rates in America. A poignant factor that suggests that the costs of certain foods may be something to investigate (I'm sure it's already well investigated. I just haven't looked it up in years).

>But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country

You haven't spent a lot of time in other 'first-world' countries. A lot of what passes for food here in America would be regarded with outright horror in most of Europe. Their food regulatory agencies simply have a much stricter standard for what can be placed on shelves. Here in America it seems like it takes just a couple dubious studies often funded by the food manufacturers to get something labelled food grade. Pick up say a chicken pot pie next time you go to the grocery store and take a look at the ingredients list and if next you have the opportunity to go to somewhere in Europe do the same. Another big difference is that the (vast) majority of Americans must have food be sweet otherwise it is unpalatable. This is why virtually everything has sugar in it. Many Europeans I know are simply shocked at how hard it is to find bread, of all things that doesn't have sugar in it. If you compare the menu from the same fast food brands like say KFC in say Tokyo and NewYork, the Tokyo version is going to be less salty, less sweet and will have fewer artificial ingredients because the average Japanese eater doesn't put sweetness above everything else and probably has a different idea of 'tastiness'

As for your claim that obesity is more of a lower class thing, I'm not sure what America you're living in. Obesity in the US knows no class, even if the rates are slightly higher for the working class it is still a problem across all social classes. And I'm not sure what that has to do with the point that people who sell crap or do crappy things are not judged by what they sell but how much they make, which is a bug or feature of capitalism in general but especially American capitalism.

In general, yeah, our portions are too large and we don't eat healthily enough!

    but an extra-large is the same size a super sized item

I don't think McDonalds has "extra-large" anything? The sizes for drinks and fries in their app are S/M/L. It is also perhaps worth noting that both of those items default to "M" for me.

I'm in NE USA.

> McDonald's salad famously has more calories than the big mac.

Almost all salads have high calories when you account for the large amount of dressing most people use. But you can control how much dressing you use, and they also have a lot more fiber than a Big Mac.

> an extra-large is the same size a super sized item

One of the points of the movie was that he would always have to say yes when asked if he wanted to super size. THAT is a big difference between just ordering a larger size. After someone already decided on the size they wanted, the clerk would then ask that question. Most people are conditioned to be polite, and many no doubt said yes simply to avoid being seen as disagreeable. This movie caused McDonald’s to stop doing this.

> But you can control how much dressing you use

Can you? If people could control what they eat, we wouldn't have the obesity problem in the first place. I would argue it's harder to control how much you consume something (let's say alcohol) than not consuming it at all, so relying people to dose their dressings based in calories is a losing proposition.

Also I think people go for the bigger size not because they're asked but because it's priced a stupidly small amount higher so people go "wow, why buy a small dose of poison for $2, when I can buy a gigantic amount of poison for $2.10? I get way more poison for my money with the second option!". TBH, I'm pretty pissed at pizzerias for trying to get me twice as much pizza as I need by making 2 pizzas literally the same price as one. Just sell me one pizza (which is by itself my whole day's worth of calories already) a person can eat for a reasonable price. Please.

Yeah. Very simple interactions with hm myself. He interviewed my boss at the 'ChipShop' restaurant in Brooklyn as part of Super Size Me. If you have the DVD I'm the waiter in the background. Just a nice guy. Took time to say Hello.

I just found out about the controversy behind Super Size Me a few days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1cw02ni/til_...

> Besides just gaining weight, the movie also claimed that Spurlock got major liver damage and started suffering from a range of mental health issues, all as a result of eating fast food. Notably, none of the people who replicated the experiment suffered from these problems.

> Years after the movie’s release Spurlock admitted to being a lifelong alcoholic, despite claiming otherwise in the documentary. Alcohol abuse can easily explain the liver damage, and alcohol withdrawal during the filming of the documentary also explains the sudden mental health problems he was experiencing.

Hmm, I'm not sure what to think with this new information.

I really enjoyed the documentary when I watched it as a kid. But I did remember thinking it was weird he puked so early in the film. I brushed it off as "everyone is different", and forgot about it.

Umm who in America doesn’t know someone personally who has visible liver damage from fast food? I know multiple families where 4/4 people have it. Why would he make that up? He didn’t even go diabetic.

> But I did remember thinking it was weird he puked so early in the film. I brushed it off as "everyone is different", and forgot about it.

That's one of the few things I still remember from it, and the takeaway I had was "well, he's eating past the point of nausea, of course he's going to puke." And the fact that he accepted any time they offered to "supersize", just pointing out how hard fast food pushes excess calories. Kind of the point of the documentary, really, that fast food is out of control in this country and needs to be regulated.

The fact that he force fed himself kinda weakens the point though, doesn't it? Force feeding yourself 5,000 calories a day even when you feel sick is obviously going to make you sick.

It wouldn’t if you were already larger.

I don’t get the ‘eating 5000 calories of anything would make you ill’ argument against the movie. That was sort of the whole point. At the time, fast food chains, and McDonald’s in particular, were pushing large (and the defunct supersize) meals all the time. That this was dangerous, especially for people who didn’t really think about it and trusted the companies, was the entire point of the movie.

Note that things have changed since then - arguably as a result of, or at least accelerated by, the movie. Supersize meals disappeared soon after it, salads were introduced (yes, you can argue they’re still high calorie), and on the whole fast food places are much less aggressively pushing the larger meals than they were in the early 2000s. I would say there’s more awareness of the importance of eating healthily among the general population too (not that that seems to be having ideal results…)

> salads were introduced (yes, you can argue they’re still high calorie),

I haven't tried those, but surely it is easier to overeat on fries and hamburgers compared to a salad?

Yeah, I agree with you.

The argument is that they’re ‘misleading’ because the _dressings_ that are provided with them are surprisingly high in calories. Like, a standard size salad with all the provided dressing is not lower calorie than one of the more traditional menu options - and people may not realize that.

I’d say the salads are pretty good BTW - better than you might think a fast food place would do.

You are correct. They're better than you would expect -- and the price is reasonable.

I was curious, looks like the equivalent (calorie-wise) of fries & a double cheeseburger is 1KG of salad.*

So yes, quite hard to overeat salad. Plus, eating that much salad would give a lot of nutrition, and throwing some beans & hemp hearts in would give you a lot of protein too.

Further to consider, it's not uncommon for people to eat the extra large fries and have two double cheeseburgers. The comparison to trying to overeat salad is only more favorable. We can also go furthe rand think of"fancy" burger places like Red Robin, there are several burgers on their menu that are over 2k calories.

* For the back of the napkin math - according to google, there's 815 calories in a fries and a double cheeseburger. For salad, I used this house salad recipe [1] as reference with 148 calories in a 170g serving

[1] https://www.nutritionix.com/food/house-salad

Don’t you remember the closing act of the documentary?

The salad with dressing and nuts has more calories than a Big Mac!!

> I haven't tried those, but surely it is easier to overeat on fries and hamburgers compared to a salad?

This reads like someone who might not have been in America much. Friend, let me introduce you to ranch "dressing": https://www.flickr.com/photos/rachelannpoling/7797400016

And yeah, the vegetables aren't the problem here - the problem is everything has to be sugar-coated (yes, even "savory" things like ranch dressing) for people to eat it, and then they drench everything from wings to burgers in it.

    At the time, fast food chains, and McDonald’s 
    in particular, were pushing large (and the 
    defunct supersize) meals all the time. That 
    this was dangerous [...]

It's still a little bit ridiculous.

A human being should be eating 90 meals per month, give or take. If more than 1 or 2 of those are fast food, that's the problem.

To what standard should we be holding a restaurant meal? "Is it healthy for a person to eat 90 of these meals per month?" doesn't seem like a useful or realistic thing to do.

> If more than 1 or 2 of those are fast food, that's the problem.

Given that full service grocery store access is area-income dependent in the US, it's a complicated situation.

"Food deserts" (areas with no access to fresh food) are a huge problem, yeah.

Also, economically struggling people often can't prepare their own food, even if given groceries for free: they may be physically disabled, they may be unhoused, they may be unable to afford utilities or appliances, etc.

However, I think that altering the offerings of fast-food restaurants is not even remotely a suitable way to address that.

> A human being should be eating 90 meals per month, give or take. If more than 1 or 2 of those are fast food, that's the problem.

3 meals a day has nothing to do with health and everything to do with marketing. If the way we eat had any ties to common sense we wouldn't be eating our largest meal at the end of the day when we have nothing left to do except sleep.

I'm confused about why you're confused. The point of the movie was definitely not to give the audience the shocking realism that if you're force feeding yourself to the point of vomiting, you're probably doing something wrong. This aspect of the movie only lessens the actual argument of the movie (except that it makes good headlines and thus probably drove the majority of the media coverage and general interest in the documentary).

> I don’t get the ‘eating 5000 calories of anything would make you ill’ argument against the movie.

Good thing that's not the argument I'm making in my comment. The argument I'm making is about forcing yourself to eat more than you want to while the very act of eating is making you feel sick. That's what Spurlock did in the movie; it's not representative of any significant population of people.

Think the point is that it's real easy to force feed yourself 5000 calories if it's 2500 calorie meals that don't fill you up for the day.

honestly the burger itself isn't too bad. Double quarter pounder is 750 calories, really filling. But tripling that from fries and drink is the real killer. You can probably lose weight from McDonald's simply by only getting water or unsweetened tea for a drink, and limiting yourself to small sides.

> it's real easy to force feed yourself 5000 calories

No it's not. If you have to force it, it's by definition not "easy". Overindulging in something is different from forcing yourself to do it. My problem with the movie is that it takes a very strange scenario (man forces himself to eat to the point of puking) and acts like that's teaching us lessons about the broader population, none of whom are doing that. It might be bad for you to eat unhealthy things that feel pleasurable, but it's obviously worse to do it so much that it's become an ordeal.

"ease" is relative here. And if you really care about that debate you can find some social media challenge posts fantasizing about how you'd consume 10000+ calories for 1b dollars. I wouldn't drone much more on that point past calorie density being an undertalked about issue with these "calories in, calories out" crowd.

Main point: consuming 3000 excess calories a day roughly equates to an average person gaining 5 points a week, 20 pounds a month (which tracks with the documentary). That is extreme. But think of 1000 excess calories (2 pounds a week) and do it over a year. We know which one is worse, and we know which one is more common. And we know it doesn't just stop after a year.

I think there's merit in demonstrating an extreme experiment (especially in this day of social media) and using it to demonstrate what happens from less extreme, but longer term bad habits.

"that fast food is out of control in this country and needs to be regulated."

Eh, I would rather see change in the area of education and alternatives than just food type/portion/etc regulation. The education can apply to multiple foods and not just the pariah of the day. Ingredient studies and approvals/disapproval would be an area of regulation that I would support though.

Having the declarative knowledge then being able to practice it. I am sure most people know that they are supposed to eat 'healthy'. It can only be one part of a larger program to combat obesity.

Many people don't know just how unhealthy it really is. Many also don't know how to make or choose their own healthy food. It's mostly about habits. It's fine to eat a super-sized meal rarely if you were hungry enough and extremely active, but it's more of an exception.

If we extend this to alcohol, then we should ban all alcohol. Alcohol is generally fine in moderation or occasional use. But if we need to ban things because a minority of the population misuses it, then we will have an extremely long list (butter, sausage, steak, etc).

Tho person you replied to didn't say 'ban' they said 'regulate' and 'a larger plan to combat obesity', and your counter of alcohol is heavily regulated across the world. Some have government run shops, others have advertising bans, or mandatory health warnings, alcohol content labelling and so on. And probably in general should be more regulated.

It read like a ban to me. Other than age restrictions, which vary wildy, it doesn't seem like alcohol regulations have done anything to prevent unhealthy use.

> It read like a ban to me.

Then you need to increase your reading comprehension. I nowhere said or implied "ban".

Or you need to examine your biases; are you perchance a libertarian? Or really right-leaning in any way. If you're American, chances are very good the answer is 'yes'.

Even during the course of the documentary, at the end his doctors were saying his body was seeming to adapt to his new diet so always found it unsatisfactory that it just ended right there.

Suddenly this Trevor Moore WKUK video makes a lot more sense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EIAN1YcEUI

I just thought it was a bad reaction to a change of diet. You can feel bad just from a few days of bad food. Can't imagine 3 meals a day for that kind of stuff.And ofc these were large portions for a (by BMI standards) very slight overweight man.

Not a doctor fwiw, but elevated ALT and AST levels often comes with being overweight and that could be seen as liver damage. I'm willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt on this claim.

The doctor literally said in the film “Ive never seen this happen from fast food binges and can’t explain it. Usually this happens with alcoholics”

It was all a scam.

Remarkable the hand waving people go through to excuse dishonesty because they want to believe it so badly.

> Remarkable the hand waving people go through to excuse dishonesty because they want to believe it so badly.

What I find remarkable is how badly people want to ignore just how bad fast food is for you. They'll use anything to dismiss completely the whole debate.

Who is doing that? I don’t see that anywhere in this discussion.

But one conclusion we can make is that his own results are useless unless your goal is to see the damage fast food will do to a severe alcoholic.

Late to this... but elevated ALT/AST levels is canonical observation of obese patients or patients with unhealthy diet.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9659656/

Alcohol is definitely a confounding factor here but this documentary is more of a "social experiment" rather than a proper study.

It's patient sample size (n=1) and doctor (n=1). IIRC, the 2 other doctors MS consulted (cardiologist and a gastroenterologist) didn't mention the same opinion as the internal med doctor and the doctor who did voice the skepticism was also saying it shouldn't be a no brainer that eating Mcdonalds would cause health problems. Other doctors on the web have gone on record to say "this makes sense."

Obviously it doesn't absolve MS of unethical filmmaking practices but that doesn't mean the premise is false given the plethora of other medical literature that supports it.

He was also gaining more weight than the laws of thermodynamics allow based on how many calories he was supposedly eating. Alcohol has a lot of calories.

Three meals a day at McDonald’s with the occasional supersize is easily 4000+ calories a day. That is a massive surplus to gain plenty of weight

Egg McMuffin and coffee for breakfast and then a Big Mac, medium fries and iced tea (or diet Coke or water) for both lunch and dinner is... 2130 calories. Not the pinnacle of the healthiest diet for sure. Over 30 days for a mid-sized dude, you might gain... one pound.

In the sister comment, I did some math and because the guy was 188cm and 220 pounds to start with, he needs 2400 calories per day just to keep his weight. He would have lost at least half a pound per week with the diet you just mentioned.

Absolutely, drinking diet coke or water is cutting out an enormous number of calories, as-is medium fries.

Heck, I only weight 185lbs and back when I ate mcDonald's a single Egg McMuffin wasn't nearly enough food to make me feel full. I'd get two and a hash brown, and still be hungry and hour later.

sure but from google, he gained 25 pounds in a month. a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. 3500 calories/pound * 25 pounds / 30 days = 2916 calorie surplus. Morgan Spurlock is a 188cm tall man, which let's say he's 30 years old and 100kg (wikipedia says he gained 24.5 pounds/13% body mass), doing no to little exercise (he did walk 2km a day) that gives a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) of 2406 calories per day (used this calculator : https://www.calculator.net/tdee-calculator.html?cage=25&csex...).

So basically, he had to be eating at the very bare minimum 5400 calories per day to get that much weight. To be fair, the wiki page says he did average 5k calories per day so he would have been lying only about 400 calories (minimum) per day.

Checking online, supersize me fried are ~600 calories and a big mac ~600. So let's say you eat that 3 times a day, that's 1200*3 = "only" 3600 calories. I find it hard to believe he drank 1800 calories worth of drinks per day to fill the gap, especially since he was allowed to drink water. Looking at canadian mcdonald's website, a large pepsi is 290 cals/77 grams of sugar, were supersize me really double that? If so, I guess the conclusion is don't drink 462g (literally over a pound) of sugar.

Your math is off because you're forgetting the beverage:

~600 kcal for a Big Mac

~600 kcal for Super Size fries (7 oz)

~500 kcal for a Super Size Coca Cola (42 oz)

1700 kcal/meal or ~5000 kcal/day if breakfast is the same as lunch and dinner

The calorie count for breakfast will likely vary. Note that orange juice contains more calories than Coca Cola per volume, but I don't remember a Super Size fountain orange juice existing.

Well damn, this gives a whole new meaning to the Whitest Kids You Know skit about going on a whiskey diet:

https://youtu.be/uOyjzE1vcD4?si=6sejNKCk-VkIzwGo

Also RIP Trevor Moore, another tragedy.

I’m just shocked Hollywood lied to us!

Hopefully this is an isolated event.

There's also the allegations of sexual misconduct (https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/filmmake...)

It's unfortunate that on the day of his death all I can really think about is how troubled the man was, between dealing with alcoholism, cheating on his past wives / gfs, the sexual assault allegations, and resigning from his company because of just how negative his public image had become. He became something of a household name because of a misleading documentary that was arguably more about the dangers of alcoholism rather than fast food.

Strange processing the death of someone with such a mixed legacy.

The blog post mentioned in the nbcnews link mentions more of his problems in addition to alcoholism, adultery/infidelity - broken family during childhood, sexual abuse, depression, etc.

see https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqc244

A society of overweight and obese people giving enormous attention on how the effects of eating McDonalds everyday cannot be replicated. Please let's snapshot everything so the future generations can laugh at how we turned into a parody.

Well the problem is that he stuffed his face with absurd amounts of calories everyday. Of course he got fat. He was eating like 5k calories a day. No one is doing that on accident cause they didnt know how big a supersize fry was.

So yes, its a super disingenious doc that is laughably transparent in its pandering to people just like you who want to make fun of obesity and trivialize it.

In case you didn't read the article linked: Morgan had a history of alcoholism and admitted later on to drinking during the experiment. That would definitely influence things, and explain why he had symptoms in his liver similar to an alcoholic.

The experiment may have been flawed but it was clearly highlighting a real issue. One that isn't just a one month stint but a multi-decade lifestyle.

What, pray tell, is the real issue?

Fast food serves too much food? Just eat less. Its an absolutely absurd premise.

Yes, indeed. That is the real real issue. People are mean to each other and fight? Just be nice. World hunger? Just share food. Rent too high? Just live together.

If only complex issues had simple solutions. Until then let's look at the layer above and solve that:

- government subsidies high fructose corn syrup, a calorie rich good.

- subsidized syrup used in almost all pre-processed food.

- is sold cheap, so it can target lower income individuals

- lower income individuals have less access to resources on dieting, or even nutrition facts.They also have less time to research such issue as they now need multiple jobs to barely pay rent.

- obesity increases in the US, disproportionately from lower income people

So we have 2-3 ways to tackle this issue past "just eat less".

Except that issue you brought up is NOT what supersize me is about. Its competitor doc, Fathead, is about that though. And absolutely lambastes supersize me.

And im not saying just eat less to fight obesity. Im saying portion sizes at a resteraunt are a moot point. People stop eating when they are no longer hungry. Do you always eat 100% of the food you get at a restaurant? Again, peiple treat obese people like theyre too stupid to figure out how they got fat, or theyre too weak minded and must have dietary decisions made for them. Fuck that. Theyre adults free to make choices like anyone else. Im all for education about nutrition, and supersize me offers 0 in that department.

>Do you always eat 100% of the food you get at a restaurant?

Given how I grew up poor, yes. Yes I do. Restaurants that weren't a McDonald's were a treat (not that I wasted McDonald's). Wasting food was about the worst thing I could do to my grandparents. Any food I didn't eat at the restaurant was tomorrow's dinner. That mentality doesn't just go away even when your lifestyle improves and food is no longer scarce.

>Again, peiple treat obese people like theyre too stupid to figure out how they got fat, or theyre too weak minded and must have dietary decisions made for them. Fuck that.

Call them what you want. You asked for answers and you're rejecting the reality of the situation. The answer for obesity isn't just "make better life choices". It's a mental addiction like alcoholism, we need to treat it like so if we want results, instead of some excuse to degrade people (again, people are are disproportionately lower class income)

>that issue you brought up is NOT what supersize me is about.

Okay. My answer isn't really isn't about supersize me anymore. That ended when I spent my first response giving context to the situation and you decided to diverge the topic with "well what's the answer?". I

I got more subtle answers around 10th-12th grade with other documentaries. The education has to start somewhere. Supersize me is a decently engaging starting point. But I'm not in 5th grade anymore. I have other, more subtle documentaries to reference for that question.

I don't really hold it in regard anymore than I hold my 3rd grade math book. It did it's job, I'm thankful for it. I don't need to go back and tear it apart over how many things it gets wrong. I'm no longer its audience.

If you're for education, stop lambasting 2nd grade math just because it "lies" about negative numbers for a while. Sometimes it's easier to contrive a system and then build on it later by denouncing those simplicities. If you don't understand calories in/out (and yes, some people don't. Gotta start somewhere), you won't understand the issue with corn syrup subsidies, you won't have all the dots to connect, and you may not put them all together in one sitting.

>Theyre adults free to make choices like anyone else.

And child obesity skyrocketed around the same time too (another documentary I watched that I can't recall). I think it's falling over the last decade, but let's not pretend this is an issue relegated to "smart adults".

>People stop eating when they are no longer hungry

I have and sadly do still stress eat. Once more: stop treating this like obesity can just be solved by saying "eat less". It's like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking.

Alright man you arent listening at all to what im trying to say, so I guess we'll just quit here.

There are, or at least at the time there were a lot of people whose meals come entirely from fast food. There wasnt a lot of awareness about how bad that could be and there had been a decades long trend towards replacing meals with microwave dinners and fast food. Supersize Me did play a part in reversing that trend. It was trying to make a very valid point about fast food and dining habits. So its science wasnt exact, but complaining about that is like quibbling with a Michael Moore documentary for being a little loose with facts

I disagree that there wasn't enough awareness. As someone who was alive at the time, there was a pre-existing moral panic about fast food and there were constant discussions before Supersize Me about how unhealthy it was, not to mention pop culture jokes making fun of it. I think that pre-existing anxiety was one of the reasons so many people saw the film.

Are you referring to 2004 when the movie came out? Just curious what "at the time" means. My personal recollection, the early 2000s was part of a pushback and the movie was part it.

As a trend from the late 80s to 90s, fast food was on the upswing I'd say. Think back to the 1940s when most American's were not getting enough calories, the average American at the time was not getting enough calories. Fast forward to past the 60s when teenage car culture is all the rage, fast food is part of that picture. If there was effectively no fast food before 1950, and by 2000's it was culturally waning, it raises the question of when was peak fast food? Both in terms of cultural "coolness/acceptanced" and per-capita consumption. I don't know if the per-capita consumpion has gone down, but in terms of culture, I'd guess that happened in the early to mid 90s. Probably co-incided with America being mostly under-nourished, to now "over-nourished" (nourished in quotes as there, as soda calories etc are not really nourishment)

Yep I'm referring to the early 200s. I don't remember the 90s as well :).

I was definitely alive at the time and remember no such moral panic. I remember how much more acceptable it was in the 80's and 90's, even in upper middle class families to have 'tv dinners' and I think even for a time in the 70's and earlier (though I wasn't alive) dining out on fast food was a fashionable novelty. I very strongly remember when there was a discernible cultural shift which saw the likes of Whole Foods going mainstream and then the shift after that when even regular grocery stores started to have organic food and in-store bakeries which they didn't have before. And fast food chains started to consciously introduce salads and drop trans-fats and make other changes to seem more healthy. The shift started before Super-size me but I remember how shocking it was and how it helped to define the new zeitgeist that books like Erich Schlosser's Fast Food Nation were also helping to create. I think Super-Size me was even directly responsible for the fast food chains changing their menu part.

>No one is doing that on accident cause they didnt know how big a supersize fry was.

People have definitely become more aware of what they eat since the documentary came out. And I'm not sure how much of that can specifically be credited to the documentary but if we are still talking about than it clearly has done something right in raising awareness.

Obviously if you are doing research in this area you were never going to cite Super Size Me as it was never serious scientific research.

Were still talking about it because the movie very effectively sold a lie.

Ever tried to eat 5k calories in a day. I bet you cant. No one, and I mean no one, was taking fast food to the extremes he was without really really trying.

I bet you can. easily. I used to eat ~6000 calories a day during training while doing competitive rowing in college. not hard with nutrient-dense foods.

your average chipotle burrito is like half way there. throw in a breakfast, snack, and light dinner and easily 5k calories.

Not only that it has the same issues as lying about Covid in the name of “public safety” - when people find out it’s a lie they’ll trust the next thing you say even if it’s 100% true.

Was the 'Super Size Me' evidence ever re-created? I watched and enjoyed the movie, but IIRC the "science" behind it was pretty suspect, and last I heard (which was, granted, decades ago) he never would release his data or testing methods or anything.

No. It was pretty well disproven actually. And he didn't disclose he had untreated alcoholism during the production which likely caused most of his problems.

So his liver was ok even though he was a lifelong alcoholic yet a month later it wasn't and the only new thing he introduced in his diet was lots of mcdonalds? Seems like he proved something.

I think I heard he was actually addicted to alcohol, which is information that he withheld, and that some scientists in a European country tried unsuccessfully to recreate his results.

Nope: https://skylertanner.com/2010/04/30/supersize-me-revisted-un...

Serious question -- can you clarify what evidence would need to be released?

The calorie counts clearly add up, because a single non-super-sized McDonald's meal is over half of a grown man's BMR. All that remains is to add up the resulting weight gain from the excess daily calories over a month.

He had more than weight gain, he suffered serious liver problems. That was in the movie despite him hiding his chronic alcohol abuse. Eating tons of fast food is obviously going to be unhealthy, but the results are pretty predictable. There's a scene at the outset where a doctor tells him something like "you'll gain weight and raise your cholesterol but that's about it" and he came back with loads more problems. The extra problems were most likely due to alcohol.

You can't really do that though. I mean at a high level, yeah a poor diet and little exercise will almost certainly lead to an adult gaining weight. But it sounds like you're describing the possibility of calculating his expected weight gain based on how much he ate and how much he exercised, and I don't think that's possible. Not to mention that it's been widely reported (iirc even from Spurlock himself) that he was drinking alcohol heavily during this period, which will further complicate this calorie-level reconcilation you're suggesting.

> it sounds like you're describing the possibility of calculating his expected weight gain based on how much he ate and how much he exercised, and I don't think that's possible.

This is a joke right? This is exactly how you calculate expected weight gain/loss.

If you can do this accurately for an arbitrary person, you will be the world's most celebrated dietician so I encourage you to go ahead and publish exactly how you're doing this.

> But it sounds like you're describing the possibility of calculating his expected weight gain based on how much he ate and how much he exercised, and I don't think that's possible.

Why? To a large extent this is possible, and with a bit of experience in how a specific person reacts, it's possible to do this very accurately. Bodybuilders will often have very specific meal plans over months, and know more-or-less exactly how much weight they will gain or lose, sometimes down to the week.

Well, we know now, after many years, that the calories in the logs don't actually account fully for his weight gain, because he was also consuming huge amounts of alcohol during the filming of the movie, which he didn't disclose to either the audience or the doctors he interacted with.

> can you clarify what evidence would need to be released?

A single replication would go a long ways. Eat nothing but McD, and accept any upsell you get, for whatever time he did (a month?), and see if anyone, LITERALLY anyone, gets the same over hyped health problems he reported.

Could he be THE ONE GUY that had some issue? Sure, but it's very doubtful.

Nope. It’s been tried and never able to be reproduced (aside from weight gain as expected because calories in > calories out)[0].

The underlying thing I’ve heard (and he admitted to, since deleted) is that he was a massive alcoholic during filming and that’s what led to the health problems. Essentially he’s said he drank since age 13, and “was never sober for more than a week since then.” Unfortunately I can’t find that direct quote anymore on a reputable site, but he mentions the alcoholism in this interview.[1]

[0]: https://www.sott.net/article/126285-Supersize-me-revisited-u...

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/morgan-spurlock-talks-sexual...

The movie was not scientific at all. It was anti-scientific if anything.

Not to argue McDonald's is health food, but his method was he had to eat McDonald's 3 times per day - even if he wasn't hungry. And additionally, if the cashier ever asked if he wanted to supersize, he had to say yes. So he was just forcing McDonald's down his throat to the point of throwing up. Name a food where you wouldn't gain weight eating it in excess.

And it was later revealed he was lying to doctors by saying he wasn't drinking when he in fact had a very bad alcohol addiction. You even see in the movie a doctor tell him he's baffled how his liver has seen such damage from McDonald's since that should really only happen from an alcohol addiction. Well, turned out years later he was secretly drinking the whole time.

The movie is a hoax. McDonald's even gave an official PR response and basically the gist was "we actually agree with the movie, you should not be eating our food like that."

I feel really bad for him, that he had an addiction he couldn't quit and felt forced to hide.

Anyone know why, given that, he'd make a movie that put his health under a microscope?

There was a moral panic over fast food that was really taking off at the time, and cashing in on it clearly paid off for him.

It did make McDonald's put more effort into rebranding with "we care about the health of kids" - I was a kid when the documentary came out and I remember frequent McDonald's ads on kids channels that were just Ronald McDonald teaching you how to do exercises. But I don't think it really made as much of a difference for people binge eating their food as much as the past few years where their prices for all their food have shot to the moon.

Calling it a "moral panic" feels almost offensively wrong to me.

McDonald's is very legitimately a serious problem in America today. Obesity and related conditions- Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, etc are at mind boggling epidemic levels. Americans today are living shorter, sicker lives than their parents despite tremendous improvements in medicine, working safety, automobile safety and less smoking almost entirely due to obesity related conditions. Childhood obesity is setting millions of children down a path of suffering before they're old enough to understand that they're being harmed or having the agency and autonomy to correct it.

This isn't a "moral panic" over something harmless like kids playing dungeons and dragons or listening to rock and roll, this is arguably the largest health and wellbeing concern in America today. If anything, as a society we probably have too much moral panic about stigmatized things like opioids and guns that impact a pretty small percent of people and have not enough concern about the unfortunately normalized things like 3/4ths of people being overweight and 4/10 being obese.

Americans have solved this by making fat into an identity which is taboo to criticize.

You're being downvoted, but this happened to me. I mentioned at work some years back something about raising my kids and emphasizing healthy eating to maintain a healthy weight, and a co-worker took me to task for "body shaming" my children. I pointed out that I was really approaching it from the health angle, but that didn't land. Really weird experience that stuck with me.

People at work bug me about drinking water instead of soda. I'm overweight, BMI of 28, so to me it seems obvious why I shouldn't be drinking sugar water. But try explaining this to them, some of them are 3x my weight at least and are offended by the notion of somebody smaller than them wanting to avoid becoming like them. It's a very delicate subject, trying to explain my desire to be healthier to people who are morbidly obese and see nothing wrong with it.

I very much agree on there not being enough concern and "moral panic" about obesity, but just feel like noting that for opioids specifically though they may be affecting only a relatively small percentage of people, last year alone there was something like 70-100k dead from fentanyl overdoses.

In that respect I'd argue that at least compared to guns or abortion as common political obsessions, opioids, especially high potency ones like fentanyl, are a lot closer to obesity in causing catastrophic death and suffering in the US.

Drinking too much is bad for you. Maybe someone should make a 30-day heavy drinking trial documentary to demonstrate it.

WKUK actually did a sketch that was exactly that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOyjzE1vcD4

Morgan did.

There is an episode of his TV show “30 days” where exactly this is the premise.

> The movie is a hoax.

There’s no hoax - he actually ate McDonald’s 3x a day. Where’s the false and preposterous claim we’re supposedly being tricked in to believing?

That it lead to the pickling of his liver?

Well he ate three McDonald’s super size meals PLUS an alcoholic’s diet of liquid calories, which is about 100 calories per drink at the least.

Fun fact: if you get a quarter pounder with cheese, Diet Coke and small fries, that’s 750 calories.

Eat that for lunch and dinner plus a McMuffin, coffee, and apple pie for breakfast and you’re at 2,030 calories.

> Eat that for lunch and dinner plus a McMuffin, coffee, and apple pie for breakfast and you’re at 2,030 calories.

That's significantly less than the average diet in the USA. According to Wikipedia it averages about 3781[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...

Spurlock was 6'2" so even the higher end of calories wouldn't be out of line for a "normal American diet", at least for total caloric intake.

Now if he was also drinking half a bottle of scotch a day, that's another 1000 calories (plus all the liver damage...).

[1]: Divide those numbers by 4.184 for the joules to calorie converion.

Also note that during the experiment one of Spurlock’s medical professionals comments on his diet as averaging 5000 kcal/day given his food logs. At another point a different professional states that these results seem impossible without heavy drinking of alcohol, implying that he wasn't disclosing the alcohol in his food logs to them either.

3781!?!?!?

Holy shit. My bulking diet is about that, I'm trying to gain weight whilst lifting 3-4x a week.

Mental.

edit: Looking at the article this isn't accounting for food wastage etc so the real figure is likely a fair bit lower.

In the US, there’s a concern that some alcohol company will start claiming their drinks are healthier than the others, so alcohol packaging isn’t required to say anything about the number of calories in the drink ( https://www.eatingwell.com/article/2052030/why-your-booze-do... ).

It makes me wonder how many people see that calories aren’t listed and assume “it must be small.” I don’t think anybody believes alcohol is a diet drink, but I’m sure many people don’t realize how it’s packed with calories.

I think they should treat it like in the UK and use a different measurement like “1 standard drink”, and, probably more importantly, forbid it from being used in marketing. I think if the minimum was 1, and even if a beer has low calories it still counts as 1 drink, it would avoid this issue.

"diet" soda is still a huge chasm of psychological confusion so I wouldn't call it the silver bullet to beating the calories in metric. If only life were so simple.

But yes, that was part of the point of the documentary. Super size portions were triple that of small and instead of a quarter pounder we're talking double or triple the meat (and maybe more grease in the burger to boot). And companies encouraged consumer to supersize because higher profit margins.

> There’s no hoax - he actually ate McDonald’s 3x a day. Where’s the false and preposterous claim we’re supposedly being tricked in to believing?

That the observed health impacts—the liver like one of a heavy drinker, particularly—were a consequence of the fast food and not, you know, being a heavy drinker.

These are very different claims:

(1) Eating fast food exclusively gives you the liver of a heavy drinker, or

(2) Heavy drinking plus eating fast food exclusively gives you the liver of a heavy drinker.

The second is also far less surprising than the first, and says a lot less about fast food.

You know, it's funny, because his specific example was definitely caused by the alcoholism and not the excess calories.

Buuuuut, America is currently experiencing a significant increase in the amount of Fatty Liver Disease for non-alcoholics.

Being slightly overweight for a long time DOES give you the liver of a budding alcoholic. It's not serious and can be reversed....... IF you lose weight, you know, that thing that people are so bad at doing, they got a fatty liver in the first place. So this is going to suck for a while.

So Super Size Me is somewhat well-done; the vast majority of the info is talking with experts like a normal documentary, the “experiment” is mostly just communicated as a framing device for unrelated discussion. (This is not 100% true because one convo with an expert is with his sexual partner, describing how the “saturated fats have gotten to his penis” and how she “always has to be on top now” due to his diet.)

However I do think it's clear in how it's framed that we're meant to categorize his McDonald's experience as informative, holding out that this experiment has some connection to the consequences we might experience from eating McDonald’s, and the problem is that he doesn't conduct the experiment in a realistic way. He was to be frank intentionally trying to generate the biggest possible weight gain in 30 days that he could. If you look carefully when he lays out his food in front of you, you'll see both a full-calorie soda AND a shake or ice cream at each meal, in addition to the super-size fries and the sandwich. The folks in the movie who saw his food log say he was consuming 5000 kcal/day, which I think is being sold as “oh my gosh I had no idea it was this easy to overeat at McDonald's.” That sentiment is not correct given the context—qnd the numbers are likely an underestimate because like folks have said, he took it seriously that he was meant to only “eat McDonald's” but gave himself latitude to drink non-McDonalds.

For these reasons and more, people since the wild success of the movie have struggled to replicate his results. See e.g. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/03/supersize-me-failed-rep... for some quick excerpts from some of these different folks.

>one convo with an expert is with his sexual partner, describing how the “saturated fats have gotten to his penis” and how she “always has to be on top now” due to his diet.

Huh. The teacher either fast forwarded through that "interview", or the school version was strategically condensed.

Alas, if only it was that easy. Forget fast food, McDonald's would be a trillion dollar industry for men everywhere.

>If you look carefully when he lays out his food in front of you, you'll see both a full-calorie soda AND a shake or ice cream at each meal, in addition to the super-size fries and the sandwich.

That may sound unrealistic, but that's not outside the realm of how some people eat. Maybe not all each meal, but throughout a day of eating. 5000 can make sense for a month to attempt to "prototype" the difference, because 3000 a day for years will show the results are much worse than any short experiment.

I’m onboard with the anti-processed food crowd. I don’t frequent any fast food joints but I get processed food at the grocery store.

It’s bad. But I also roll my eyes when someone in 2020+ brags about their pristine normal diets, goes on a processed-only diet (to prove some point that no one needed to be convinced about?) and then have embarrassing moans and sighs every time they take a bite.

oooooooooHHHHH

Am I too far gone? Too numb to the pleasures of processed food?

I suppose we browse different parts of the net, but I've never come across that scenario.

I saw the movie when it came out and had distantly interacted with Morgan while he was making the film (he was an acquaintance of an acquaintance). I don’t recall the movie ever being presented as “scientific” so it’s really interesting seeing all these take-downs of it for that reason. I remember it being a quirky “documentary” (more along the lines of edu-tainment) about this weird funny thing he did. It was wild that the film gained as much traction as it did, which I don’t think was anyone’s expectation at the time. So yes, it is 100% not scientific but I really don’t think it was intended to be.

Well myself and everyone else in school at the time had to sit through it in health class. Teachers LOVED this movie.

>Name a food where you wouldn't gain weight eating it in excess.

You seem to be laser focused on the chemistry and less on the psychology. The point was that yes, some people back then (when fast food was actually cheap) would eat it 3 times a day and not question much. It was only filling enough for a couple of hours but highly calorie dense (mostly friends and soda, though). Much easier to lose track of that then most other foods.

If we could scientifically convince people not to overeat, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic in the US.

Lasty, consider the audience. I watched this in 4th and 6th grade. What's obvious to you c. 2024 wasn't obvious to 11 yo me, especially not in anticipation of a lifestyle where I drive everywhere instead of being subjected to 1 hr of PE a day

>McDonald's even gave an official PR response and basically the gist was "we actually agree with the movie, you should not be eating our food like that."

And people continued to. The shuffled some stuff around as PR, but the calorie density remained the same. Coke gives too much profit margins to cut but is the biggest problem. Salads were still covered in sugar and salt so they were not in fact better than burgers. Super size was cut, but large sizes increased to 80% of supersize.

So yeah, as you said. Any food in excess gains weight. The portions and ingredients continued to be excess.

ALT and AST of over 100 aren't an accident, usually. Rewatching this a couple years back this stood out immediately.

> Name a food where you wouldn't gain weight eating it in excess.

Every vegetable for a start.

I like this list

https://healthbeet.org/printable-list-for-calories-in-vegeta...

Even for just corn, 1.8kg of food a day to hit 2000 calories is gonna take some effort.

As part of an intro to optimization class in university, we inputted gov't nutrition health guidelines and the McDonalds nutritional menu into a model. Solved how we could hit the health guidelines (min and maximums) by only eating McDs. Basic conclusion is McDs is fine if you don't eat the fries or sodas.

The book "Fast Food Nation" was an optional reading. It explained how McD single-handedly improved the quality of beef and potato industry in the US.

Aren't government nutritional health guidelines heavily influenced by politics/outside influence?

I know we've gotten past the food pyramid, but don't guidelines continue to heavily favor dairy?

(and doesn't mcdonalds still have a lot of saturated fat?)

I could be making huge assumptions here. But I imagine the GP's experiment was as simple as focusing on "recommended calories" (which is 2000 per day) and secondarily, keeping under/over certain nutrients (low sugar/cholesterol/fat, high vitamins).

Food pyramid was much less scientific and more of a basic guideline for school children (and yes, the dairy campaigns were very successful, though dairy at least has nutritional value and usually a good "fill" factor). But I don't think any of those hard nutrient recommendations were every challenged.

Were they? I honestly haven't looked into it.

I don’t recall coming away from Fast Food Nation with the impression that McD improved things, but it has been many years. I thought the book focused on how agribusiness increased the risk of contamination by pathogens like E. coli and the effects of marketing to children.

From YouTube[1]

> We should all thank Morgan for showing us that eating 5000+calories a day while being a raging alcoholic and drug addict is unhealthy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXtJ12EeaOs&lc=UgyA_kYg7pohG...

"drug addict" is uselessly unspecific in a medical context, and socially is just derogatory.

I agree that saying both alhoholic and drug addict is redundant.

Well, you're never going to convince modern culture. Something something moderate.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/03/supersize-me-failed-rep...

"the conclusion, weak as it is, is sufficient to show that the Supersize me documentary is dubious, or maybe even a hoax. Clearly, eating a lot of McDonald’s fast food (or Burger King etc.) is not really so unhealthy that there is serious health risk after a month. The other anecdotes and this study of 18 people showed that clearly. So what did Morgan Spurlock do? Who can say. We can think of benign explanations: maybe McD/Burger King changed their ingredients after 2004, or they differ between Sweden and USA, or Swedes are more naturally resistant to bad diets than English. Or maybe Spurlock engaged in a lot of creative freedom."

The takeaway was not ‘bad food is bad’ but ‘bad food with absolutely no activity is bad’

A nutritionist responded with a study where he only ate candy and multivitamins but increased his movement exercise 10x. All his health metrics went up.

Must have a hell for hunger pains, though. I can take a moderate walk and feel hungry (which can lead to overeating and cancelling out the exercise gains). I can't imagine the discipline to simply ignore your hunger for those early weeks with a bunch of water and candy.

Cancer seems to be getting many rather young people :(

With the increase it cancer among the young is concerning.

Ironically this is likely linked to more industrialized diets.

Or is it newsworthy because it's an outlier? Availability bias might also be a factor here.

No, by raw numbers cancer under 50 has increased substantially.

Cancer deaths as well? Otherwise it could be an artifact of better screening.

I wonder how much alcoholism contributed to it here though.

We never know, but it can depend on the type of cancer and the particular cells that could have been mutated by the carcinogen. Bottom line is that humans need to figure out how to stop cancer cells from dividing so much.

Increase in balding, increase in microplastics found in blood, increase in depression and loneliness, increase in social media addiction. Definitely concerning times.

Super Size Me 2 was even better than the first one and I haven’t seen it mentioned here at all. It was an interesting and eye opening look at the chicken industry and what goes into those delicious chicken sandwiches we all love.

The sad thing is he never really captured the magic in a bottle again. All of the documentaries after Super Size Me were kind of... nothing. He kind of failed to cash in on the genre he himself invented.

In a lot of ways, whether he or anyone there ever realized it or not, but his influence on today's Youtube cannot be understated.

It probably truly was ligntning in a bottle. I can't comment on his other movies, but very very few works become so sensationalized that a collective generation all remember viewing the same thing in school. Especially in video format. Supersize me stands alongside Bill Nye, Magic Schoolbus, and maybe Idiocracy as "something everyone my age/country has seen", no matter where we grew up.

I say sensationalized simply because I don't think the quality of the documentary really influenced that. Maybe his other movies are much better from a critical lens (especially in wake of criticism over his experiment). It was truly the right place at the right time

I don't know what's sad about that, it's fortunate enough to get one such hit in one's career. Also, the doc he did about product placement was also well received from what I've seen.

It's true. Everything has a peak. All directors have a film that did the biggest box office. His was "Super Size Me."

Born in 1970, in a place massively polluted with carcinogens by DuPont.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkersburg,_West_Virginia#Pol...

The wikipedia article really gives short shrift to that issue.

Spooky how the story about his alcoholism making the rounds earlier this month. Was he sick?

Seems he died from cancer.

Often causative, though from GPs phrasing, it could be they're insinuating the alcoholism was a smokescreen for cancer, which seems unnecessary...

They're just saying it's strange he was being widely talked about for the first time in 20 years and then he suddenly dies

Morbid serendipity.

Yeah -- this is all that I meant

Pwilly?

The article mentions he was fighting cancer.

Lots of cancers are related to alcoholism. Not saying this was, but I think I see OP’s point.

Correct, alcohol is a group 1 carcinogen.

P, Pwilly, PDubs, Fat Pat, whatever you want.

I somehow overlooked the cancer piece in the article thanks

What does pwilly mean

It's what I called him at a previous job.

who dis?

I messaged you on Facebook.

I always thought he confounded the Super Size Me experiment by guzzling all that soda. That much High Fructose Corn Syrup alone will give you fatty liver disease.

Anyway, RIP Mr. Spurlock. You lived a flawed life but gave us some really interesting films which will live on. Thanks.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-hig...

maybe it was the fast food that did him, in the end

For Supersize Me, notably Mr. Spurlock failed to disclose to his doctor or viewers his drinking habit, which more likely contributed to his abnormal blood panel readings, not the fast food. The whole thing was propaganda that the public ate up. It's hard to overstate how big of a deal that movie was in 2004-2005. Colleges organized group screenings of it. The ensuing bad press from Supersize Me forced McDonald's to discontinue its eponymous meal upgrade option.

I dont understand this recent talking point. Surely eating a "supersize me" multiple times a day is going to cause an increase in fat, weight, cholesterol etc. We know this.

Plus the fact that the whole documentary was intentionally extreme: no one eats mcdonalds 3 times a day. Its sorta pointless to begin with.

Pointing to his alcoholism to dismiss the health concerns, which are obviously true, seems very odd to me.

The point of the documentary is to track how his health is affected by the food. Consuming a lot of alcohol is a relevant, major confounder. It discredits the work.

You're saying that the results of the experiment would be "obvious", so what's the reason for doing the experiment at all? If you're going to do the experiment, why do it with an alcoholic?

Far from being odd, his alcoholism was almost an ideal way to dismiss any concerns about fast food. Having a reasonably healthy non-alcoholic go to McDonald's when they are hungry, and still doing the gimmick of accepting "Super-sized" when offered, would be what you should do. The problem is that the effects of that wouldn't be very dramatic. McDonald's isn't a magical gypsy curse, it's rich, high-quality food with too much sugar (in the soda.) You can do the same thing to yourself cooking raw ingredients at home and drinking sweet tea. If you're an alcoholic, you can fuck up your liver without eating a thing.

> no one eats mcdonalds 3 times a day

Wasn't there a guy claiming to eat only Big Macs in the documentary?

I can believe it back then, when the big mac was either on the dollar menu or very close to value prices. I wouldn't believe it in 2024 where the sandwich alone is $5 + tax (disclaimer: high CoL area).

Big Mac is probably the worst burger because of that stupid middle bun, but it's not awful by itself to eat. 700 calories or so. It's the drink and soda that double that and really puts you over.

He's still at it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/01/most-mcdonal...

>Pointing to his alcoholism to dismiss the health concerns, which are obviously true, seems very odd to me.

The very doctors talking to Spurlock in the documentary told him that what they saw of his liver should be impossible if he wasn't an alcoholic, thirty days of eating 5000 calories a day or not. It takes a significant amount of time to do that kind of damage to your liver.

Turns out he was an alcoholic.

SuperSize Me wasn't "about" "hey did you know if you eat a lot of fast food, it's bad for you?", the thesis of the production was that thing that America loves to ignore: A company wants you to buy more of their products and services, and will happily sell them and push them to you, no matter how much it hurts you.

"SuperSize me" was about how McDonalds had their cashiers push supersizing at every single purchase, as if it was Gamestop pushing their magazine, despite that empirically not being something the vast majority of purchases SHOULD do, because it's profitable.

Like christ folks, it's the damn title!

The "it made me unhealthy" portion of the movie was basically fraud though, and quickly called out as such. But it wasn't there to "prove" anything, but rather because American Documentaries from the period (and probably still now) view themselves first and foremost as "shock" entertainment, second as spectacle, and only have meaningful content if there's some spare room in the runtime. Documentaries "compete" with action movie schlock in the US

Passed away due to complications from Cancer.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/morgan-spurlock-documen...

This is very sad. I was inspired by his films to think about society in unique ways, and enjoyed some of what he produced. It is a terrible loss to creativity.

This article is sparse with “more details soon”; Wikipedia seems up to date with a recent obituary reference; https://variety.com/2024/film/obituaries-people-news/morgan-...

That site could do to mention his admission to decades of chronic alcoholism in his “MeToo” letter, which of course void the results of his Super Size Me study, in which the doctors repeatedly said he had liver damage “consistent with years of alcohol abuse”, which he then pinned on the McDonalds.

I for one am pissed that his fraudulent hit piece has made it impossible for more than one person to get SuperSize options and share them, resulting in potentially less overall calories than multiple other orders, along with cost savings and less work for the employees.

> piece has made it impossible for more than one person to get SuperSize options and share them

They sell extra large sizes that are basically the same and can still upgrade to it. They just dont call it "supersize" any more or directly offer it. Well, at least the McDs I go to once in a while doesn't directly offer it as I have to ask.

YMMV

Interesting, didn't know that was an option. I'll have to give it a try.

>I for one am pissed that his fraudulent hit piece has made it impossible for more than one person to get SuperSize options and share them, resulting in potentially less overall calories than multiple other orders, along with cost savings and less work for the employees.

Is that really the hill to die on? Regardless of the results, McDonald's is under holy hellfire for more or less quadrupling prices over the last decade.

And of course those profits don't go to employees. When California increased minimum wage for fast food workers, layoffs all around. Hey, less work for the laid off! And more work for the survivors. Bonus: they then try to blame the price hikes on neeeding to pay their labor.

We aren't getting cheap fast food, and employees don't have it better. Morgan didn't really affect that.

I'm not dying on any hills – I'm just upset that the guy knowingly lied to the public, got rich-ish and famous as a result, and we all got screwed over for it.

My point is we're screwed either way and SuperSize me was a small blip in the grand scheme of things. You're missing the forest for the tree.

If a forest has been leveled and I eulogize a particularly beautiful old tree that one was the pride of the land, the pedant who butts in saying “other trees died too you know” isn’t contributing anything much.

Given the order of the conversation here, I believe you'd be the pendant. The top of the chain linked to an obituary, and your first comment is essentially "he hurt my tree, good riddance".

Meanwhile, your tree is long gone by big corporate and Morgan at best swung a bat at it. You understand my POV here when I see that?

The root comment is concerned with details about the individual. I provided details about the man which were not included in the link. I additionally provided a personal anecdote about how the immediate impact of his life work directly affected me, and possibly the fellow reader.

You butted in to talk about how corporate business practices have changed over time in ways that by your own admission have absolutely nothing to do with this guy, and accordingly have no place in this thread.

> By the end of the experiment, Spurlock claimed that he gained 25 pounds and suffered from depression and liver dysfunction.

Important to note that the man was hiding alcoholism at the time.

Super Size Me was pretty good, but I really enjoyed 30 Days. It was great to see people's opinions challenged.

I was in one of the 30 Days episodes. It was... very very very much reality-TV, not reality.

They made things up, planted things, and generally hammed it up to make things interesting. Still maybe interesting to watch, but not something I'd treat as accurate.

Every person who has ever been in a reality TV episode will provide stark testimony that it's completely manufactured, yet millions of Americans will staunchly swear that it's just "embellished" reality, not manufactured reality.

It's truly frustrating.

We've sadly been in a post truth era for a while. And the advertisers have won the war.

The most palatable reality shows are game shows, and it's only middling in the day where you can search up any esoteric fun facts. Sure, the contestants are highly biased in selection, but I assume (maybe wrongly?) that the rest of the show is people playing by some set rules and answering unprepped trivia. Ripped off in prizes by taxes, but everything else is "real"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Spurlock

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1041597/

The first episode of his TV show ‘30 days’ remains the best show I have ever seen.

He and his fiancé try to live on minimum wage in Columbus, OH. It is staggering what that life looks like in the richest country the world has ever seen.

All politicians should be forced to do it for 12 months, no exceptions.

I prefer the movie Fat Head where the guy loses weight by only eating mcdonald (and walking i think?).

The article only tangentially touches upon his alcoholism without noting that the claimed effects of his diet in the 'documentary' was in fact not due to eating McDonalds for a month but was caused by drinking a fifth of vodka daily. Not really mentioned, but I would not be surprised to learn that this alcohol abuse was a significant contributing factor for his cancer.

This is the first I heard of this. Did he start that drinking habit at the same time as the McDonald's thing? If it was already an old habit by the time he started, wouldn't his health be in the gutter from the start of the burger diet?

No, he was a long-term alcoholic and that is why his final health report was so bad. Add in the additional calories he was drinking each day plus any DTs from a hard-core drinker trying to go straight for a few days while filming a movie and the results are pretty much exactly what we would have expected to see.

I think they did report his medical readings in the actual movie, might be worth going back to visit if they made an actual baseline reading and see what glimpse that gives for his initial health.

The doctor in the documentary tells him that his liver is damaged like an alcoholic's. He just let people assume it was from the food.

I understand we want to contribute cancer to something someone directly did, but that isn't always the case. Cancer sometimes just happens.

Definitely, but alcohol abuse definitely raises the odds of certain types of cancer. The specific type of cancer was not mentioned, but if it was liver or bowel cancer I would suggest alcohol played a role and if not I would classify this in the 'probably something that just happened' category.

Or certain head neck and stomach cancers. Or pancreatic cancer. A lot of cancers.

The metabolite of ethyl alcohol, acetaldehyde, is a well documented and potent carcinogen

Correct, but "carcinogen" is still a percentage of a chance of mutation developing. For example, there are heavy-alcohol users who don't develop cancer.

Rampant alcohol abuse is arguably the worst thing you could do to your body so it probably played a part - not talking a few beers a night; I mean a "fifth" of vodka a day like he said he drank. I used to be a heavy drinker, but at my worst, I probably drank half of that a few days a week for two years or so - I maybe drank a fifth in a day a few times - but it got to the point where I couldn't function, gout, weight gain, just generally feeling like dogshit. I don't understand how people can do that for decades and live let alone be successful.

The simple fact is that no amount of alcohol is good for you. Same goes for smoking anything, marijuana included. Also, processed meats are definitely carcinogens.

Yeah, cancer can "just happen" to anyone, but there are undeniable factors that can significantly increase your chances of getting it, such as poor diet or being overweight.

You might not like it, but those are the facts.

That said, I'll also put out there that I think a a lot of people are overly dismissive of "Supersize Me" by pointing to Spurlock's alcoholism, completely ignoring how bad fast food is, on every level.

In fact, cancer is always happening in practically everyone. Sometimes the body doesn't successfully kill off those cells, however.

> An estimated 6% of cancer cases can be attributed to alcohol consumption which increases the risk for cancers of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, liver, colorectum, and female breast. Approximately three or more drinks per day may also increase the risk of stomach and pancreatic cancer.

https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cance...

Two of my uncles and my grandpa drank heavily every day for most of their adult lives. They went out young, and the end wasn't pretty.

Like most people, I think 750ml of liquor daily sounds incredible. That is equivalent to what the NIH defines as a "binge", three times every day. But to alcoholics that's a pretty average level of drinking. I always go back to this graph that still leaves me astounded. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/09/...

And just think, a small percentage of liquor store customers, comprise the majority of their revenues. That's why when the COVID lockdowns happened, liquor stores and carry out restaurants got special provisions to keep this customer base still drinking.

You just can't stop drinking alcohol; it can kill you.

In South Africa they banned alcohol during Covid - it is major driver of emergency hospital admissions and gender based violence and it dropped during Covid and we could treat Covid patients.

But the black market price of liquor and cigarette's went up by 300% and somebody delivered by drone.

Alcohol here in Norway is quite expensive. A good friend working as a ER nurse during COVID said about a year in that the biggest issue they faced were all the alcoholics drinking hand sanitizer.

I believe that graph was criticized as inaccurate, though I can't find a source now. Somewhat different from these figures in https://arg.org/news/drinking-norms-in-the-us/ which seem more plausible to me.

I wonder what "demons" he had in his life.

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