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.
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?)
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.
"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 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.
This is a joke right? This is exactly how you calculate expected weight gain/loss.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
Anyone know why, given that, he'd make a movie that put his health under a microscope?
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.
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.
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.
There is an episode of his TV show “30 days” where exactly this is the premise.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Every vegetable for a start.
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.
> 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...