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Boris Godunov
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Portland, OR
Aug 2001
time: 00:35
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I was almost sick just reading this. I can't think of the last time I had McDonalds or any other fast food (It's been at least 3 years, I think). Still, this is just narsty.
Bon appetite!
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Lord of The Fries
Morgan Spurlock Got His Fill of Ailments Making 'Super Size Me,' But He's Been Fortified by Its Impact
By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page N01
NEW YORK
It is lunchtime at a McDonald's in midtown Manhattan and the tempting aroma of hot french fries wafts out of the deep fryer and into the tidy plastic dining room. The restaurant is bustling with chattering students, office workers with laminated ID tags clipped to their breast pockets and blue-collar men wearing shirts with their first names embroidered in block letters. At the counter, the aggressively efficient, fast-talking clerk announces, at the slightly elevated volume used by those for whom patience is a job description, "WELCOME TO MCDONALD'S. May I take your order pleeze."
Folks stare at the menu board overhead, more out of habit than interest. They already know what they want. At virtually every table, diners are kitted out with the full McDonald's experience: signature hamburger with its special sauce, large fries cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, and a soda of significant proportions.
This is the idyllic fast-food scene. Hardworking folks with not much time to spare grabbing a hot meal for about $5. Teenagers gossiping across a molded plastic table, tossing fries at each other in jest. After finishing their lunch, a group of four high school boys -- a blur of crunchy hair gel, angry acne and hormonal adolescent awkwardness -- pull out a deck of cards and linger over their 32-ounce sodas.
Film director Morgan Spurlock walked into scenes just like this every day for a month. He was on a McDonald's diet, seeking to survive on nothing but fast food for 30 days and to document the effect on his health. Spurlock is not a nutritionist, scientist or health food lobbyist but rather a first-time filmmaker armed with a video camera. So he sidled up to Ronald McDonald, romped through Playland and ate three meals a day at the world's largest fast-food chain. Every morsel that he consumed -- from the syrup on his pancakes to the water he washed it down with -- came from McDonald's.
At the end of his experiment the once-healthy Spurlock waddled out of the last McDonald's with a splotchy face, a reduced libido and 25 extra pounds. He had been transformed into a pudgy young man with dangerously high cholesterol, chest pains and a liver that was overwhelmed by the fat in his system. The transformation has been edited into "Super Size Me," a documentary on the American obesity epidemic, which won critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival and will be shown at the Lincoln Theatre today as part of Filmfest DC.
"I talked to doctors beforehand and they all said, 'You're going to be fine.' Three different doctors were all saying, 'You're going to be fine.' It was shocking to everybody, what started to happen," Spurlock says.
"Maybe this movie will be like 'Scared Straight!,' " he says. "Everybody knows [fast food] is bad. But nobody knows how bad."
In the sober aftermath of Spurlock's fat-and-sugar binge, it is hard to look around a McDonald's without becoming acutely aware of an American population overwhelmed by obesity. Double-wide derrieres trundle lunches high in saturated fat to tables. On the menu, the generously sized Extra Value Meals take center stage with the eye-popping appeal of a Broadway billboard. Near the tray-busing area, brochures touting "balanced eating" and "nutrition facts" give consumers the dire news that the Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese contains 760 calories and 100 percent of a diner's daily allotment of saturated fat -- 20 grams.
On April 19, the chief executive of McDonald's, James Cantalupo, died of a heart attack, a fact that makes a person wonder how many Big Macs (11 grams of saturated fat) the average McDonald's executive consumes over a career.
"I was completely shocked and taken aback. He was only 60 years old," Spurlock says. "I wish only the best for his family."
In the film, Spurlock highlights his attempts to interview a McDonald's executive, but to no avail. In the tradition of Michael Moore's "Roger & Me," this film depicts McDonald's as a faceless corporation using inexpensive food, sugary drinks and fatty burgers to lure the American populace into a lifestyle of plus-sizes, seat belt extenders and gastric bypass surgery.
But McDonald's says that by the end of the year it will have phased out its super-size options, which allow a diner to order about one-third of a gallon of soda or a half-pound of French fries and call it a single serving. And it recently announced that it was sending celebrity trainer Bob Greene on a cross-country biking and walking trip during which he will stop at McDonald's to talk to people about healthy living and tout the company's Go Active! Happy Meal, which includes a salad.
The demise of super-sizing and the collaboration with Greene are unconnected to Spurlock's film, says McDonald's spokesman Bill Whitman.
"The movie has absolutely nothing to do with McDonald's," Whitman says. "The essence of the movie is about one person's conscious decision to overeat. That's not what McDonald's is about."
Spurlock came up with the premise for "Super Size Me" in 2002, while in the throes of a post-Thanksgiving dinner tryptophan stupor. Reclining in a chair, his tummy distended with turkey and all the trimmings, he watched a television news report of a lawsuit filed against McDonald's by two young women who accused the burger chain of making them obese. The suit was eventually dismissed.
"I'm not a litigious person, and I think that what's happened to this country is that we start blaming other people, but I kept hearing about the ingredients in fast food and the marketing and packaging and processing. Then I heard McDonald's say, 'Our food is nutritious.' And I thought realistically you should be able to eat it every day."
Before Spurlock began his journey into saturated fat and refined carbohydrates, he established a few ground rules based on observations he'd made of typical McDonald's customers. They order Extra Value Meals, not à la carte. They're not so fond of the salads. They generally say yes to super-sizing when asked. For 30 days, Spurlock, under the supervision of those three doctors and a nutritionist, took all of his meals at various McDonald's across the country, from New York, where he lives, to Texas. He super-sized when asked. He ate everything on his tray. He cut back on exercise, trying to take no more than the 2,500 steps that the average American walks in a day.
In this pop cultural climate dominated by the stupid human tricks of reality television shows, it is forgivable to assume that Spurlock spent a month speed-eating Big Macs. But the point of "Super Size Me" is not to give the audience the experience of a county fair eat-off or an episode of "Fear Factor," but rather to simulate in a compressed amount of time what Spurlock believes many Americans do to their bodies over the course of a year.
On Day 1, as Spurlock started his morning by biting into an Egg McMuffin -- its hockey puck of egg sandwiched inside an English muffin -- he proclaimed with a grin that he was embarking on the fantasy diet of an 8-year-old. Coincidentally, his first Big Mac looked as though it had been styled by the editors of Gourmet magazine: The bun was springy, each familiar layer was in its place, the beef patties looked as though they were still sizzling, and the special sauce dribbled enticingly over the edges. Before this project, Spurlock was an occasional fast food customer. And in the beginning of the movie, he speaks with great fondness about delicacies such as french fries, hamburgers and other items that make nutritionists cringe.
As the days went on, he might have a Quarter Pounder for lunch and a Big Mac for dinner. He sated his sweet tooth with McFlurries and yogurt parfaits. He drank super-size Cokes, doused pancakes in packets of syrup and drowned salads in Newman's Own Ranch Dressing, a single serving of which has 290 calories.
Encountering his first super-size meal, Spurlock quickly begins to complain about his physical ailments: "McGas," "McGurgles," "McStomachache," he exclaims -- and then vomits from the window of his car. By Day 9, even the Happy Meals are bringing him no joy.
Initially, his doctors thought he'd put on a few pounds, raise his cholesterol a bit and do a little damage to his triglyceride level. But by the third week, internist Daryl Isaacs announced with full-throated shock that Spurlock was turning his liver "into pâté." Spurlock was having chest pains and Isaacs was begging him to consider taking an aspirin a day. His cholesterol level had shot up from a normal 165 to 225. His nutritionist was pleading with him to lay off the sodas and take a multivitamin. His girlfriend, Alex Jamieson, a vegan chef and holistic health counselor, bore the _expression of someone trying to be supportive even as she was simultaneously repulsed and terrified. "I have to say it was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. Around Day 21, when he goes to the doctor and he's had chest pains in the middle of the night . . . I told him that I thought, 'You could really hurt yourself permanently.' "
Along the way he talks to nutrition experts, former surgeon general David Satcher, educators, a food industry lobbyist, obese adults, fat teenagers, McDonald's junkies and his mother, who offers to give him a piece of her liver if his turns fully into foie gras. Spurlock argues that McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants enable Americans to indulge their insatiable appetites, and he shows Americans happily, knowingly and willingly consuming high-fat foods.
"It's a film about corporate responsibility and personal responsibility," he says.
More than a year has passed since Spurlock, 33, ended his McDonald's diet. In his SoHo office, Spurlock leans back in his chair with an amiable slouch. He is dressed in an orange shirt, jeans and the sort of olive green, thick-soled work shoes that loudly announce that the wearer is not, nor has he ever been, part of the establishment. With his sandy blond hair, lightly etched goatee and schoolboy cheeks, Spurlock has a mischievous demeanor and a sense of humor more prone to sarcasm and twisted irony than broad comedy. He has the geographically indistinguishable accent of a newscaster. He is 6 feet 2 and once again a healthy, lean 185 pounds -- a fact that viewers of "Super Size Me" will find reassuring.
Spurlock grew up in Beckley, W.Va. -- "a very overweight state. I go home and see a lot of people overweight. But if you leave New York or any major city, all there is is fast food and casual fast food. The portion sizes are huge. People need to educate themselves and become aware. I'm not all about blaming everyone for everything. It's a huge personal responsibility."
"My mother worked like crazy, but she went home and cooked dinner because it mattered. A nutritional table was important to her. Most people don't cook," he says.
"Super Size Me" was made for $100,000 and the director cannot hide his amazement at the attention it has attracted.
"It's been awesome. To see a film talked about on 'Ebert & Roeper.' . . . I met Michael Moore. He'd heard about the film and knew about me. I met Eric Schlosser [the author of 'Fast Food Nation']. The doors that the film has opened, it's the greatest experience of my life."
The film was financed with profits from one of his first ventures, "I Bet You Will," an online show that was eventually picked up by MTV. It is a guerrilla-style production in the spirit of "Punk'd" and "Fear Factor": Folks on the street were offered a wad of cash to execute a dare. "We bought the clothes off a Wall Street trader. We left him in his underwear and briefcase," Spurlock says. The most famous stunt involved paying a woman $250 to shave her hair into a Mohawk, mix the hair clippings with several sticks of butter, and then consume the mess.
The connection between "I Bet You Will" and "Super Size Me" is the compelling spectacle of a sideshow. It is the same fascination that draws audiences to watch escape artists and exhibitionists such as David Blaine.
Like everybody on "I Bet You Will," "I knew what I was getting myself into," Spurlock says. And in twisted solidarity with the trader left nearly naked on the streets of Lower Manhattan and the woman who ate the hairball, Spurlock submitted to an on-camera rectal exam and in a month ate 12 pounds of fat and 30 pounds of sugar. "I paid my debt to society," he says, rubbing his tummy at the memory. "This house is clear."
Almost as soon as Spurlock finished his last McDonald's morsel, his girlfriend had a custom-made "detox" vegan diet waiting for him. For six weeks, he ate organic vegetables and olive oil. Meat, dairy products, sugar and caffeine were all off-limits. His cholesterol and triglyceride levels righted themselves. He lost the weight he'd gained -- the last five pounds were, of course, the hardest to shed.
Now, he's back to eating meat. Spurlock thinks that he puts on weight easier than before he started this experiment. And to his taste buds, McDonald's french fries now taste a lot like plastic.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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05-05-2004 07:43
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