Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

"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.

That it lead to the pickling of his liver?

> 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.