Morgan Spurlock would like to "be like Mike"—Michael Moore, that is—and he is off to a good start. His new film, Super Size Me, turned the 2004 Sundance Film Festival on its ear, with its masochistic, cautionary tale about the evils of fast food and its connection with the epidemic of American obesity.
For one month, Spurlock subjected his body to the ultimate punishment of three squares a day at McDonald's. His rules were simple: He would eat only what was available over the counter; he would super size his meal only if the counterperson asked if he wanted it so; and he would not give up, in spite of the continuous protestations from his doctors.
During this period, the New Yorker had his weight and blood chemistry monitored by a team of three physicians, and he consulted regularly with a nutritionist. The results were a stunner. His weight soared from an athletic 185 to a flabby 210, his cholesterol shot up from 160 to 230, and his liver went from healthy to dangerously unhealthy.
It must be mentioned that Spurlock did other things to achieve these levels. He went from being physically active to sedentary, stopping his daily workouts and limiting his activity to that of a typical American, even using a pedometer to count the number of steps he took each day. It's also fair to say that one man doesn't exactly constitute a scientific study. Nonetheless, it's all pretty scary.
Before I go on, though, I need to provide full disclosure. My name is Max Jacobson and … I am a foodoholic. True, I have often weighed in on the evils of fast food myself in this space, and have encouraged my readers to buy books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and similar muckraking tomes on the state of modern American nutrition. But I must admit, that even after a month, stripped to the waist, Spurlock still looked better than me, and that the rich, salty diet I eat in fancy restaurants, year-in, year-out, isn't a lot better than a doing a month at McDonald's. (It tastes a lot better, though.) So before getting too philosophical about Spurlock's experiment, I need to come clean about my own lifestyle. Whew! I feel better already.
I wouldn't bring myself into this at all, but obesity is mostly about personal responsibility. Despite being bombarded with fast-food ads every time we turn on a TV (a point Spurlock makes in chilling fashion when a group of preschoolers can identify Wendy and Ronald McDonald, but not Jesus or George W. Bush), the fact is that no one is forced to eat this stuff.
No one forces me, either, to eat foie gras and gelato, at least beyond one taste.
Disclosing this lets me say that it is up to every parent to see that his child eats a proper diet. I laughed aloud at Spurlock's counter to a shrink who theorizes that Americans continue to eat at fast-food restaurants because of happy associations about time spent with Mom and Dad. Is he going too far when he says, "Whenever I drive by a fast-food restaurant, I'm going to punch my kid in the face"? It's meant as a joke, but in every joke, there's a little truth.
Having said this, the actual process will shock you, even if Spurlock marks the deck by photographing morbidly obese people; a puddle of his vomit after eating a super sized Big Mac, a half-pound of fries and a 42-ounce Coke; and a gastric bypass operation, guaranteed to make you say "Eww!"
The film crisscrosses America, taking you from our fattest city, Houston, to Wisconsin, where a thin McDonald's enthusiast named Jim Gorske is eating his 19,000th Big Mac. This is Spurlock being balanced, I guess, and so what if the man looks sallow and slightly insane.
In spite of many unpleasant visuals, though, the movie is fun to watch and a real eye-opener about important issues. Public-school lunch choices are appalling and Spurlock's girlfriend, a healthy vegan chef by trade, lets us in on a dirty little secret about his performance, or lack of it, where it counts. Fast food, it seems, even affects the sex drive.
If you aren't sufficiently put off fast food watching Spurlock eat it, you will be by the film's end, when you see the 8 pounds of sugar and 12 pounds of fat he has consumed during his month in purgatory in their natural state.
Super Size Me already has had a positive effect. All the fast-food chains are scrambling to reduce the amounts of sugar and fat in their products, and the evil empire, McDonald's, no longer offers the supersize option.
Tobacco has been demonized in this society, and obesity isn't far behind. Someday, someone is going to come up to me in a restaurant and say, "Do you really want to eat that dessert?" And you know what, I'll probably thank him.