Supersize me continued

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

This was an interesting take to me of the Mac's diet story/move:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/movies/07SUPE.html?th

" 'SUPER SIZE ME'

When All Those Big Macs Bite Back

By A. O. SCOTT

For 30 days, Spurlock consumed nothing but food from

Mc's, an experiment in bad living that frames a jaunty critique

of junk gastronomy and corporate power.

MOVIE REVIEW | 'SUPER SIZE ME'

Starring Spurlock. Directed by Spurlock. (NR, 98

minutes). For 30 days, Spurlock consumed nothing but food from

Mc's, an experiment in bad living that frames a jaunty critique

of junk gastronomy and corporate power. Like a less aggressive,

thinner , the director talks to consumers, experts and

food-industry flacks, weaving alarming statistics about rampant

obesity with visits to the doctor and double-quarter-pounder-with-

cheese combo meals. The film is an entertaining statement of the

obvious, though its big questions — do corporations serve our need or

enslave our bodies and soul?, are public health problems caused by

capitalist rapacity or personal choice — are not as simple as Mr.

Spurlock would have us believe. — A. O. , The New York Times

MPAA Rating: NR

Review | Showtimes| Trailer

Average Reader Rating: 4.83 Stars Rate This Movie

Number of Votes: 18

Super Size Me, " Spurlock's affable, muckraking documentary,

elaborates on some facts that everyone seems to know: mainly, that

the United States is in the midst of an epidemic of obesity and

related health problems, and that fast food is bad for you. His

attempt to demonstrate the link between these two matters, using

himself as an experimental subject, represents an entertaining, and

occasionally horrifying, statement of the obvious. After all, even

the Mc's corporation, while defending itself in a lawsuit filed

by two overweight teenagers, submitted briefs citing the well-known

health risks of its highly processed, high-fat foods. Mc's'

victory in the case was followed by the passage in Congress of a bill

shielding the industry from future liability.

Like suits against tobacco companies, such cases — and the larger

issue of the relationship between legal consumables and public

health — turn on the question of responsibility. Does it rest with

those of us who eat, drink and inhale the products that clog our

arteries and corrode our livers and lungs, or with the companies who

sell and advertise them?

Mr. Spurlock's answer, emphatically anticorporate on its surface, is

perhaps more ambiguous than it seems. After all, no one forced him to

consume nothing but Mc's food — three meals and more a day,

from hot cakes and sausages at dawn to Double Quarter Pounder combo

meals late at night — for 30 days. It was his choice.

Supervised by three doctors and a nutritionist, and observed by his

girlfriend, a professional vegan cook (identified by an on-screen

caption as " healthy chef " ), Mr. Spurlock, a fit, active New

Yorker, happily set out to ruin his health, and succeeded beyond his

wildest expectations. There was some weight gain — 18 pounds by the

end of the experiment — and also mood swings, loss of sex drive and

nearly catastrophic liver damage. His general practitioner, Daryl

Isaacs, likens Mr. Spurlock's all-Mac diet to the terminal alcoholic

binge undertaken by Nicolas Cage's character in " Leaving Las Vegas "

and worries that his patient may succumb to liver failure before the

30 days are up.

This individual, self-induced medical horror story is accompanied by

a jaunty barrage of anecdotes and statistics. Not content to stay in

Manhattan (which has the highest concentration of Mc's outlets

in the country), Mr. Spurlock traveled to places like California,

where the chain was born, and Texas, not only the largest state in

the union but also one of the fattest. He observes the eating habits

of Illinois adolescents, who are fed carbohydrate-loaded treats in

their middle-school cafeteria, and meets a man (a very skinny man, by

the way) who estimates that he has consumed more than 19,000 Big Macs

in his life, the high point of which might have been the day he ate

nine.

Mr. Spurlock, originally from West Virginia, works in the good-

natured, regular-guy populist style of documentary rabble-rousing

pioneered by . He is a bit less confrontational than Mr.

(as well as thinner), but he similarly relishes letting polite,

well-scrubbed corporate flacks entangle themselves in bureaucratic

doublespeak. In this case, everyone in the food industry seems to

want nothing more than to educate consumers, especially young ones,

to make good choices.

Anyone who has watched commercial children's television — where the

majority of the ads hawk food of dubious nutritional merit — has seen

such education in action. There is a funny, revealing sequence in

which Mr. Spurlock goes to several Mc's restaurants in search

of posters and handouts with nutritional information and discovers

that they are difficult to find and sometimes not available at all.

There is a heartbreaking moment when an overweight girl worries that

she will never lose weight because she can't afford to eat two

sandwiches a day from Subway, the diet that made Fogle into the

chain's favorite spokesman.

There are also interviews (some conducted over cheeseburgers and soft

drinks) with nutritionists, lawyers and Satcher, the former

surgeon general of the United States, all of whom raise alarm about

heart disease, juvenile diabetes and other scourges of a society

built on cheap, convenient and abundant calories.

The arguments in " Super Size Me " will be familiar to readers of

Schlosser's best-selling " Fast Food Nation, " and like that book, Mr.

Spurlock's film is as much about corporate power as it is about

health. His conclusion is that it's us or them, that we should kill

Mc's before Mc's kills us. This may be a little

melodramatic, but it should nonetheless give you pause. In any case,

it seems more likely that we will continue to live in a fast-food

world, perhaps more warily (and more queasily) in the wake of Mr.

Spurlock's experience. His movie, which opens nationally today, goes

down easy and takes a while to digest, but its message is certainly

worth the loss of your appetite.

SUPER SIZE ME

Directed by Spurlock; director of photography, Ambrozy;

edited by Stela Gueorguieva and (Bob) Lombardi; music by Steve

Horowitz and Parrish; produced by Mr. Spurlock and The Con;

released by Roadside Attractions and Goldwyn Films. Running

time: 96 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Spurlock, Mc, Dr. Daryl Isaacs, Dr.

Ganjhu, Dr. Siegel, Bridget , Rowley, andra

son and Dr. Satcher