Super Size Me: Is Fast Food Really to Blame?
September 28th, 2009
Super Size Me is an informative documentary about the negative impact that McDonald’s and the rest of the fast food industry are having on society. Despite the importance of this message, Super Size Me neglects several critical factors that I consider to be more important than the popularity of fast food and it even gives an inaccurate representation of why fast food is unhealthy.
The majority of Super Size Me is based on Morgan Spurlock’s one month binge of eating nothing but food from McDonald’s. This was inspired by lawsuits from two teenage girls who blamed McDonald’s for their obesity. At the time of the lawsuit, one girl was 19 years old and weighed 270 pounds at a height of 5 feet 6 inches and the other was 16 years old and weighted 170 pounds at a height of 4 feet 10 inches.
During this one month experiment, Spurlock ate three full meals per day from McDonald’s, only ordered a super size meal when asked, and never ate food from any other source.
The Sad State of American Health
Super Size Me presents some startling facts that show the sad state of health in America. According to the documentary, 60% of American adults are either overweight or obese. Although the methods used to define someone as being overweight are often criticized, the majority of people that I see every day are clearly overweight. In fact, most of these people appear to have more body fat than Spurlock did after his month long McDonald’s binge. Spurlock even stated that his 18% body fat measurement at the conclusion of his diet was still less than the national average for both men and women.
As the documentary points out, more than 400,000 preventable deaths per year in America are caused by obesity related illnesses which is second only to smoking. The long list of the health issues that are associated with obesity include hypertension, heart disease, stroke, gall bladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, respiratory problems, endometrial cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, steatohepatitis, insulin resistance, asthma, hyperuricemia, reproductive hormone abnormalities, polycystic ovarian syndrome, impaired fertility, and adult onset diabetes. It doesn’t help that unhealthy food can also be addicting. During the later stages of Spurlock’s diet, this was made evident by the significant boosts in mood that he experienced shortly after eating McDonald’s.
Diabetes in particular has become a significant concern, and if the current trend continues, 1 out of every 3 kids that were born in the year 2000 will develop it in their lifetime. According to Tommy Thompson, the Secretary of Health and Human Services when Super Size Me was filmed, the direct medical costs associated with diabetes more than doubled from $44 billion in 1997 to $92 billion in 2002. In addition, Dr. William Klish of the Texas Children’s Hospital claims that anyone who develops diabetes before the age of 15 will lose between 17 and 27 years of their lifespan. He also says that about 20% of obese children have abnormal liver function and show evidence of scarring and fibrosis which are indicative of early stage cirrhosis. If these children continue their unhealthy habits into adulthood, they’re livers will likely fail and leave them in need of a transplant.
This is certainly disturbing, but does it accomplish anything to blame it on McDonald’s and the rest of the fast food industry?
How Realistic is the One Month McDonald’s Binge?
At the end of Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock admits that the diet he followed is unrealistic, but counters with the suggestion that it’s not all that far fetched because some people eat at McDonald’s every day. According to the documentary, 22% of the people who eat McDonald’s do so 3 or more times per week. This is less than a quarter of McDonald’s customers, and more importantly, 3 times per week is significantly different than 3 times per day. Furthermore, the number of people who eat close to 5,000 calories of McDonald’s every day and force themselves to eat it until they throw up as Spurlock did is probably pretty close to zero. Unless you’re very large and very active, 5,000 calories per day of any type of food is bound to have negative effects, and in addition, it requires considerable effort to eat 5,000 calories of food in a single day, even with the high calorie content of fast food.
There’s no doubt that fast food is unhealthy. However, if we’re going to assess it’s potential impact on health, then it should be based on a reasonable intake. After all, if you were to eat 5,000 calories of fruit every day, you’d likely gain a lot of weight and develop diabetes and other health issues. Does this mean that you should avoid fruit? Obviously not!
A Questionable Bias Against Fat
Super Size Me did a good job of emphasizing the unhealthy amount of sugar contained in most fast food and even points out how one of the founders of Baskin Robbins died of a heart attack at age 51, how the other founder developed severe diabetes, and how Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s underwent a quintuple bypass at the age of 49. Spurlock’s dietitian even suggested that he limit his intake of soda and milkshakes because of their high sugar content, but he didn’t listen. Despite the attention given to sugar, there’s a clear message throughout the documentary that regards the high fat content of fast food as the primary reason for it’s harmful impact, especially from the commentary of Spurlock’s physicians.
Contrary to popular belief, saturated fat and cholesterol don’t cause heart disease. In fact, they support a number of the body’s most important functions and are critical to good health. Despite this, Super Size Me reinforces the misguided idea that fat and cholesterol clog arteries simply based on their consumption and subsequent circulation in the blood stream. Spurlock’s vegan girlfriend half jokingly insinuates that the fat and cholesterol from his McDonald’s diet was restricting his blood flow and leading to impotence. This is about as valid as the heroin analogy that she uses to challenge Spurlock’s preference for the taste of meat.
Tom Naughton, creator of the Fat Head documentary, addresses this issue directly. Displeased with Spurlock’s isolated focus on fast food and it’s high fat content as the cause of obesity and poor health, Naughton also followed a month long fast food diet. However, unlike Spurlock, he kept his meals to reasonable proportions, didn’t stuff himself with food until he threw up, and limited his intake of sugar and carbohydrates. Naughton’s results were strikingly different from Spurlock’s.
The Results of the McDonald’s Diet
By the end of Morgan Spurlock’s month long McDonald’s binge, he had become depressed and exhausted, he was experiencing dramatic mood swings, and his sex life had greatly diminished. He gained 25 pounds, his body fat percentage increased from 11% to 18%, his liver was showing notable signs of damage, and his total cholesterol increased from 168 to 225. However, because of Spurlock’s unrealistic extent of excess calorie consumption, the only thing that this really proves is that overeating is unhealthy.
Chances are that most people will focus on the increase in Spurlock’s cholesterol and attribute it to the fat and cholesterol content of fast food. However, the fast food diet that Tom Naughton followed suggests otherwise. After a month of eating nothing but fast food, but in reasonable proportions and with limited amounts of sugar and carbohydrates, Tom’s cholesterol actually decreased and he even lost weight! In Super Size Me, Spurlock interviewed a man who eats at least 2 Big Macs every single day and has eaten more than 19,000 of them in his lifetime. Despite this, his total cholesterol is 140! It’s quickly noted that this man rarely eats french fries, but this contradicts the documentary’s position against fat because a Big Mac contains more fat and more than twice the amount of saturated fat than even a super size serving of McDonald’s french fries.
Although most people realize that fast food is unhealthy, I suppose some people still don’t. For this reason, I think the Super Size Me documentary does a great job of conveying this important message. However, it does so in a misguided way and fails to address what I consider to be a much more important issue.
Fast Food is Only Part of the Problem
Fast food is clearly unhealthy, but even without it, most Americans are still likely to become overweight and develop health problems. Most people know to limit their intake of fast food, but what they don’t realize is that most of the foods that they buy from the grocery store aren’t much better. Many of these foods are highly processed and labeled as healthy. The average American typically buys foods like bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, boxed snacks, pasteurized dairy, and pasteurized fruit juice thinking that they’re healthy choices. In reality, they tend to contain just about as much refined carbohydrates and sugar as fast food, and because most of these products are highly processed, their nutritional quality is typically not much better.
It’s our own responsibility to be informed about what we choose to put in our mouths, and even without fast food, it’s clear that many of us aren’t embracing this responsibility with the urgency that it deserves.
Who Really Deserves the Blame?
I am by no means a supporter of McDonald’s, especially considering their contributions to factory farming. However, I don’t think it’s justified for a documentary like Super Size Me to isolate them as the primary cause of obesity and poor health in America.
John F. Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University, disagrees and claims that it is justified because of their magnitude and how they target children with Ronald McDonald and their playgrounds, birthday parties, and toy giveaways. Despite how rotten this is, it’s a very successful business strategy, and if McDonald’s goes down, the next fast food franchise to take over the majority of the market share will likely do the same thing. It will be a never ending fight until the problem is addressed at it’s origin.
Banzhaf also claims that fast food is clearly the source of the problem because the food we eat at home and at family restaurants hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. This couldn’t possibly be further than the truth. In fact, according to the Food, Inc. documentary, our food has changed more in the past 50 years than it has in the past 10,000, and this certainly isn’t isolated to fast food. Even at home people are eating much more processed food and are either avoiding fat entirely or are using unhealthy vegetable oils instead of the natural animal fats that we evolved on.
Advertising and Parenting
Super Size Me also places a considerable amount of blame on advertising. As much as I agree that television commercials are often a negative influence, they still don’t justify the general public’s lack of initiative to take responsibility for themselves and their children. According to the documentary, the average kid sees 10,000 food commercials per year, 95% of which are for sugary cereals, soft drinks, fast food, or candy, and by comparison, if a parent were to eat every singly meal with their child and promote healthy food choices, this would only occur about 1,000 times. As much of a challenge as this may be, it’s still the parent’s responsibility to limit exposure to these commercials and make the time to instill sound nutritional principles. After all, it’s not the television commercials that are putting food into the mouths of children.
The documentary also includes an overweight 16 year old girl who describes how depressing and difficult it is to envy her thin peers. This is an unfortunate problem that many teenagers are faced with, but this doesn’t change the responsibility of parents to teach their children the importance of valuing themselves for who they are and to show them the basic nutritional principles that will keep them healthy and thin. Unfortunately, many parents aren’t any more knowledgeable about these issues than their kids, and this brings us back to the importance of taking responsibility. Unfortunately, it seemed clear to me that this teenager perceived herself to be a helpless victim rather than realizing that her circumstances are the result of her own choices and that she has complete control of her ability to reverse them.
Have You Taken Responsibility?
Towards the end of Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock asked a number of people what a calorie is. Despite it being an extremely common term and the subject of nearly all dietary advice, most people didn’t know, and in my opinion, this signifies the true problem. Too many people lack the initiative to learn about healthy food choices, and instead blaming themselves for the health issues that result, they blame whoever or whatever is most convenient, which in this case is McDonald’s.
The lawsuit against McDonald’s that I mentioned earlier was dismissed based on the judge’s ruling that the two girls were unable to prove that eating McDonald’s was the direct cause of their weight problems. In regard to this, Spurlock refers to his month long binge of unrealistic and excessive calorie consumption as if it’s the proof that was missing from this case. If that justifies a lawsuit, then who can I sue if I make myself obese by eating 5,000 calories of fruit every day?
At the conclusion of Super Size Me, Spurlock explains that McDonald’s, or any other fast food franchise, can’t be blamed for being a profitable business. Because the fast food industry relies on industrial agriculture, and in turn has a significant impact on the environment, I disagree with this, but it leads to an important point. Spurlock goes on to say that the only one who can truly make a difference is you. I think that this contradicts the general theme of Super Size Me, which is that McDonald’s is mostly to blame, but nonetheless, I couldn’t agree more that the actions of the general public are what matter most. McDonald’s will only be profitable as long as people continue to buy their food, and despite the influential advertising, they’re clearly not forcing food into anyone’s mouth.
Despite my mixed opinion, Super Size Me does contain some valuable information and is even humorous at times. If you haven’t already seen it, I recommend that you check it out.
Post this on Twitter
Post this on Facebook
Support this on StumbleUpon
Email this to friends
Leave a comment
This is a very fair assessment, Vin. I saw Super Size Me years ago and recall wondering who in their right mind would be willing to serve as a guinea pig and go through this experiment…and why…I haven’t seen Fat Head or Food, Inc. yet, but I see your point.
I agree that we all should be taking responsibility for what we consume. However, the reality for many people, especially families who have a tight squeeze of a budget and time, is that the convenience of fast food is hard to beat. Still…
The challenge then, for the times when we can’t fix a meal using natural, unprocessed, healthy ingredients low in sugar, is to find better alternatives to fast food chains.
Your point is well taken. Diet is important enough that we really should be willing to invest the time, energy, and money necessary to get it right.
And maybe if enough of us protest these chains peddling pillowy processed foods, they might revamp their menu and include even more healthy options than they do now…
Hi Belinda, thanks for your comment!
I appreciate the fact that some people have very little money to spend on food, but this is no excuse to be buying things like soda. Furthermore, most people who say that they can’t afford healthy food tend to have a lot of room to change their priorities and find additional money to spend on higher quality food.
I don’t think that having a limited amount of time is a valid excuse either. With a little planning, it’s easy to prepare multiple meals in advance and be ready for a situation when there’s not enough time to cook.
I totally understand that healthy eating can take work. However, life is what we make of it and our wellbeing depends greatly on the food we eat. Anyone who chooses to not bother with the challenge of implementing healthier habits is choosing accept a compromised life. It’s all about initiative. Once priorities are readjusted and challenges are overcome, healthy living really isn’t that much work. The change is what’s difficult.
Thanks for the wake-up call, Vin! All of us should take responsibility of our own health, diet and as a matter fact, our own life. If most of us, if not all, choose whole foods over fast foods or processed foods, then we’ll begin to see less packaged foods on grocery shelves, less fast food chains, and more wholesome restaurants and eating places serving organic foods.
Exactly! We can blame food manufacturers and fast food franchises all we want, but they will only continue to sell and promote what we continue to purchase.
Hi Vin. I never watched the movie because I didn’t see the point. The idea that it’s a fast food restaurant’s fault that we are fat is ridiculous. They are selling what people want to buy or they would fail as a business. People are not going to solve their problems until they take responsibility for themselves. They guy in the movie supersized himself.
What people need to do is read blogs like yours so they can learn what kind of food to eat, what kind of food is good for you and what kind of food is bad for you. Then it’s their responsibility to put it in their own mouth.
Exactly, Stephen! Thanks for your support!
Many people just don’t realize that controlling their circumstances is not all or nothing. We can choose to control at least <80%.
Many are just putting their precious resources (thus, their power) on the wrong place most of the time. Mostly, Time: negative thinking, ridiculous media (e.g ads), entertainment without substance Money: unnecessary things. Health: bad food. I could go on listing every bad example.
Solution: Learn something to know the right places and think you are creative! learn to use less resources for garbage! We become more responsible when we learn. We know what's garbage when we do, but include intuition or critical thinking if you don't have. Just learn, as it is.
Bottom line: People are sometimes thinking: learning is not my thing!. Mainly it is due to their ego or they keep saying no time. Wake up! learning is way beyond the tip of the iceberg, oh, I mean classroom.
Well at least the seed is planted.
In mid-2008, I watched this movie not knowing its true essence, this article helped me clear the confusion. I had fun with its humor.
I excuse all those who put their responsiblity to others, simply because they have not learnt.
So putting your responsiblity to someone else is giving away your power to someone else. Does that sound sad? It is time you realize you can take back the power that you have given away, through the passion to learn.
Big entities want your power for themselves too, by not letting you know in the first place! Learning the truth will set you free.
Never underestimate your true power inside you. You can get your primary source of power from yourself, not others because theirs is only secondary.
Learning about true health is not only for medical professionals, due to its profound simplicity (not complicated, as big companies would want you to believe). This site simplified the key concepts you must know.
Everybody can learn about it, just replace ego with intuition.
Hi ægil, thanks for your comments!
I agree that many people simply don’t understand the importance of health eating or healthy living in general. Part of the problem is that may not have ever experienced vibrant health and don’t realize what they’re missing, or perhaps they’re willing to shortchange themselves by accepting their decline in health as a part of aging. In contrast, some people simply don’t want to be bothered, and that’s their choice.
My goal is to help the first group of people realize what they’re missing and help them overcome the challenges of implementing better habits.
Hi Vin, this is right on the money. I don’t believe Macdonalds are to blame for people being fat any more that a credit card company is to blame for people going into debt. We have choices in life and choices have consequences.
You are also so right about parents having to take responsibility, I think there is no need for children to be obese.
Thanks, Steven! Credit cards are an excellent analogy.
I think it’s also important for parents to pass that responsibility to their children and teach them that their health is often a result of their own actions and choices.
Very interesting and informative. We definitely are the answer, though what animal fats are available for a pesco-vegetarian like myself? (I eat seafood, eggs, and veggies)
Thanks, Justin! That’s a tough one since animal fat typically comes along with meat. If you eat dairy, then butter and ghee are two excellent and nutritious sources of saturated fat. Coconut oil is an excellent choice as well.
Depending on your motive for being a vegetarian, lard or tallow might be acceptable for you. Lard is pure pork fat and tallow is pure beef fat. However, they can be hard to find and you have to be especially mindful of quality because the toxins that conventionally raised livestock are exposed to accumulate in their body fat.
An interesting and related note about beef tallow is that McDonald’s used it a long time ago for their french fries before switching to trans fat in response to the misleading propaganda about heart disease, cholesterol, and saturated fat. Very ironic!
Hi Vin – I love this article, and it has many important points – especially the fact that people assume that just because they are not eating fast food, they are eating healthy (while shopping at the supermarket and buying processed foods that they are told are good for them to eat). I will comment more (and read more later)…I’ve been really busy with my son’s school lately and have not been blogging or reading as much lately. I’ll be back.
Thanks, Raine! I’m glad to hear that you’re back to blogging!
Hey Vin — You made some really good points here. In any case, I’m glad for the movie and the book from Super-Size Me. Sometimes an extreme video will get more attention and press and whathaveyou.
And I didn’t even HAVE a McD’s on the small island I was living on when I was having the health problems that led me to a raw food lifestyle. So obviously for me that was spot on that it wasn’t realistic to eat at McD’s daily. I was just eating packaged whole-wheat pasta and cheese and yes meat too but mostly things purported to be healthy.
Anyways, thanks for sharing.
Eva
Hi Eva, thanks for your comment!
I too think that Super Size Me is a worthy documentary to have and see. Although it’s misleading in some ways, especially in regard to fat, it still delivers a positive message about choosing to eat healthier.
I completely forgot, I wrote an article awhile back that was published in Healthy Beginnings Magazine which used the premise of SuperSize Me to make a point about the connection between sugar and alcohol.