Editor's Note: I recently
had to watch Supersize Me for a school assignment. Although
I had heard about this movie previously (as per the review
below), actually watching the movie myself,seeing and hearing
the evidence presented first hand, had a much stronger impact.
I am not one to eat fast food in the first place, but after
viewing Morgan Spurlock's story, I am even beginning to question
the packaged foods I purchase in the grocery store.
Folk Building starts with the self. A healthy
body is part of the whole picture! If you have not seen this
documentary, you need to! It will change your life...especially
if you are a fast food consumer!
Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Supersize
Me follows his journey on a 30-day MacDonald’s diet!
Morgan starts his experiment by visiting several doctors where
he takes a physical exam and has blood work done so that he
can see where his health is before he begins. He is diagnosed
as an above-average healthy male who is 6 ft 2 and weighs
185.5 pounds. When asked, Morgan’s doctors guessed that
throughout the 30 days, he will gain weight and his cholesterol
will go up. They believed that this was the worst that was
going to happen — everyone was in for a rude awakening.
 After
the test results were in, Morgan began his experiment. His
rules were that he had to eat three meals a day, within the
30 days he had to have eaten everything on the menu at least
once, he had to super-size if asked and if MacDonald’s
didn’t sell it, he couldn’t eat or drink it (and
this included water.) For the first three days, Morgan was
miserable. He was sluggish, tired easily and had did not successfully
hold down his first super-sized meal (which comes with a half
a pound of French fries!) After the first three days, he began
to feel better —he said he was “over the 3-day
hump.” On day 5, he checked in with the doctors and
he had gained 10 pounds! By day 12 he had gained 18 pounds
and by day 18 he suffered from migraines, fatigue and depression,
which was only cured by eating more MacDonald’s. He
was starting to become addicted. Morgan’s doctors advised
him to discontinue his experiment as he was going into liver
failure and they were worried that his project would cause
irreversible effects. He decided to go on. On day 21 we woke
up in the middle of the night with what felt like heart palpitations
and he had difficulty breathing and on day 29 he could barely
walk up the stairs. He continued on wanting to prove to the
world that this fast food, which is consumed by 1 out of every
4 Americans on a daily basis, is detrimental to our health
and is one of the major causes of obesity. It should be noted
that obesity is only second to smoking now as the leading
cause of death.
Throughout Morgan’s 30-day diet, he traveled
to several different places and researched the cause and effect
of a variety of different junk foods. He spoke with the Baskin-Robbins
heir, John Robbins, who walked away from his fortune. Robbins
spoke about his family and the horrible effects that the ice
cream had on them and their health. His father developed diabetes
and his uncle (Baskin) died of heart failure and was over
weight. Morgan spoke with people about fast food and many
people said that everyone has a choice. You can choose to
walk past the MacDonald’s or you can choose to go inside.
This may be true, but Morgan wondered if our youth were being
taught to make the correct choices. He decided to visit a
public school on their lunch break. He stood at the lunch
line and watched as most children walked by with French- fries
and milk, or candy bars and canned lemonade. He looked at
the options these children had — fries, pizza, candy,
chips, chicken nuggets — and he asked the woman who
was working in the line if she believed that the school lunch
program was offering the children healthy alternatives. She
claimed that most children brought healthy things from home
and then bought a couple of things from school to add to their
lunch. Morgan started following the kids back to their tables,
and there was no other lunch. Next he began talking to the
women who “cook” (or should I say heat) the lunches.
They admitted to only having to cook food a few times per
month. Everything else came to them in a box and all they
had to do was heat it. The school was also proud of themselves
for not serving soda. However, the canned lemonade that one
child bought has as much sugar as a can of Coke, the only
difference was it did not contain caffeine. After leaving
the public school, Morgan visited an alternative school whose
students were placed their mostly due to behavioral problems.
This school had switched to a lunch program called “Natural
Ovens” where everything was prepared fresh and only
healthy and wholesome foods were served. The price of this
healthy alternative was about the same as the public school.
Soon after changing to this lunch program, the faculty noticed
a significant difference in the behavior of the children and
the school began to run smoother. Why aren’t all public
schools making the change to better quality food? The answer
is simple — big business. Companies like Pepsi and Nestle
would pull funding to the schools if it was no longer cost
effective for them. Now, after knowing all of this, how can
we say that everyone has a choice, when our children are growing
up with all bad choices? These children who are given these
poor options at school are the same ones who see an average
of 10,000 junk food advertisements per year. Will these children
grow up knowing how to make good choices?
I do not want to give away the entire documentary,
but you should know that it took 8 weeks before Morgan’s
blood work returned to normal; it took him 5 months to lose
20 pounds and 9 1/2 months to lose the rest. He was lucky
though — his girlfriend is a vegan chef who created
a “detox” menu to help him return to normal at
a faster rate.
Now you may be telling yourself that this won’t
happen to you because you would never eat fast food 3 times
per day. However, you should ask yourself: “If a product
can do this to someone in 30 days, is it really something
you want to consume or feed to your children?”
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