Wow. This is something that would swear me off fast food for the rest of my life. Not long after this film was released, McDonald's stopped super-sizing their meals...not because of "Super Size Me" of course. I don't think a whole lot else has changed because early on, Morgan Spurlock (the self appointed guinea pig in the experiment and the director of the film) pointed out there are powerful food lobbies in Washington that are in place to make sure their industries are looked after. That means...no bad laws about fast food or food content and as many supportive laws as possible. An example: Congress enacted legislation to prevent obese people from suing McDonald's or any other fast food restaurant.
I think Spurlock took the experiment on because the judge in the original cases declared that the victims couldn't prove that McDonald's made them sick. Spurlock was a healthy young man at the beginning of his experiment, which was to eat 3 McD's meals every day for a month. He wasn't going to ingest anything that wasn't on the menu, including aspirin and vitamins. Now that's a bit extreme but I guess he wanted to be "pure". Well, three doctors examined him and pronounced him to be in excellent health with all his blood levels and weight to be in just the right place.
Half way through the experiment, the doctors were freaking because he'd gained like 17 pounds and his liver was being destroyed by all the fat.
It was scary.
Even scarier were the interviews he did with kids. Little ones could identify Ronald McDonald but not George Washington or Jesus. Middle school kids were eating lunches consisting of french fries, candy and soda...and my youngest confirmed that this is so at her school. Spurlock tried to put the cafeteria staff at the middle school on the spot about all the french fries and candy. They preferred to believe that these kids had brought in healthy lunches in brown bags and were just supplementing with the junk. Spurlock dragged them to several tables and asked the kids point blank--and all they were eating was junk. The cafeteria manager started this "aba dabba" stuff that made her sound like Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden stuck in a lie.
Back in the kitchen, the larders are crammed with crap the government sends to the schools to serve ... or it's crap sent by a big vender who doesn't want the schools going to a healthier provider--this is where the lobbyists come in again. Meanwhile, the lobbyist who agreed to be interviewed admitted that they were part of the problem...guess what? He isn't working there any more!
Anyway, it took Spurlock 1 month to gain almost 25 pounds and screw up his health. It took 8 weeks of a "detox" vegan diet to get his blood work back to normal and five months to lose all the weight he'd gained.
It's too bad he focused only on McDonald's because then someone had to come forward on their behalf and prove you can lose weight just eating their food. Sure...but you have to be very careful about your choices. As Spurlock found out, nutritional information wasn't easy to find in the restaurants.
But it's not just McDonald's that is the problem. It's all the fast food, the processed sugary fatty junk we're offered day after day.
Healthy food is expensive. If you are on a limited income, it's hard to shop healthy.
I think the biggest stumbling block to us getting healthy (through better choices, switching vendors, getting soda out of schools, etc) are the food lobbyists.
What can we do? Boycott, boycott, boycott all those unhealthy products. Maybe something will get done.
In other news, I saw this article today about leptin, the weight loss hormone:
Leptin, a hormone tied to body weight, may ease depression, a new study shows.
I'm really interested in that! I mean, here I am--probably full of leptin--and I'm still depressed! What's up with that?
The whole article is here.
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