Super Size Me - Movie Review

I've wanted to see this movie/documentary since it came out but missed it when it was in theaters (or the one theater, as it happened here). Director Morgan Spurlock's film explores the epidemic of obesity in America by mixing discussions with experts with his personal experiences going on a 30-day all McDonald's diet. Having been burned sufficiently by Michael Moore, I went into this documentary very skeptical. I forced myself to suspect that Spurlock was a food ideologue who was going to build a very specious case for his cause. At the same time, I regularly recognize the growing problem of obesity, especially in kids, so I knew deep down that I was probably going to end up convinced at his thesis. I was both right and wrong.

I thought my suspicions about Spurlock were confirmed as things got started. He introduced the topic of the film by discussing the lawsuits in 2002 against McDonald's, the ones that tried to blame Mickey Ds for the obesity of two teenage girls, the ones that were eventually (and rightfully, in my view) dismissed. He visited a Georgetown Law Professor, the first to win a settlement against big tobacco, who was advising the attorneys in the lawsuits. It was clear that both of them felt McDonald's was at least partially culpable for the obesity problem in America. They cited the fact that McDonald's markets directly to children - the playgrounds, the Happy Meal, Ronald McDonald, and so on. Later on, the professor even compared McDonald's focus on kids to some big tobacco studies that were interested in how to get kids hooked early by having them play with cigarette toys that resembled their real cigarette containers. Things seemed very one-sided for a while, very much like a 60 Minutes piece.

But as Spurlock got going on his diet, the film became less of a Moorumentary (have I coined a word?) and more of a traditional documentary. In fact, Super Size Me was most compelling when it stuck to the facts associated with Spurlock's new eating habits. For 30 days in a row, he had to eat three meals a day at McD's and he couldn't consume anything that wasn't sold by them - no aspirin, no vitamins, nothing. He had to eat everything on the menu at least once, and he could only supersize if he was asked. To gather the right kind of data, Spurlock regularly visited a general physician, a gastroenterologist, a cardiologist, a nutritionist, and an exercise physiologist. He started in perfect health at 11% body weight. His diet had him consuming more than twice his recommended caloric intake, and the levels of sugar and fat were through the roof compared to what they would be with a healthy diet. I won't say what he ended up with, but I will say his doctors were urging him to stop the experiment half-way through.

Sadly, Spurlock's film was not content to highlight the perils of eating fast food every day, or even more than a couple of times a week. Instead, he kept trying to pin the blame for America's obesity on McDonald's, and the corporate food and drink industry. He was shown calling McD's execs, trying to get interviews, to no avail. Surprise, surprise - they wouldn't talk to him. He went to see a lobbying group that represents the food and drink industries. A la Moore, he painted the lobbyists' and the corporations' greed as the reason for the big problems. He and the Georgetown Law professor visited several McD's to see if they could find the nutrition information. When they had a hard time, the conclusion was that people can't be held personally responsible for making good choices when the data is not available to them. To that, I can only offer an inarticulate, WHATEVER! The judge agreed with me, saying that McD's cannot be held responsible when there is no evidence that they are solely responsible for the kids' weight. Moreover, the defense attorneys correctly argued that everyone knows fast food is bad for you, and that McD's never tries to say it isn't.

So, with regard to my expectations, I hate to say it but I think I was right - Spurlock is an ideologue with an agenda. If he'd just leaned more toward implicating McD's and the other corporations as the source of the obesity problem than he did on individual failures to make responsible decisions about food intake, I would probably have let him off the hook. Though I can't bring myself to let the people who eat like crap off the hook, I can see his point. Alas, I caught him in a definite lie, which will taint him in my mind forever Moore (oops, it slipped).

Spurlock visited some schools to show how badly the lunch programs these days have become. Kids were shown eating french fries, chocolate bars, and Gatorade for lunch, and nothing more. The scenes were effective - I was shocked at how much things have changed since I was a kid (assuming they weren't staged - this is what you have to worry about when you watch Moorumentaries). But then our attention was turned to another school that had taken an all-natural approach to lunch programming. All foods were prepared fresh. There were salads and loads of fresh fruits and vegetables, and there was no beef. Then came the lie - Spurlock claimed that this school lunch was not the specialty of some ritzy private school, but that it was actually found in a public school for kids with learning disabilities and behavior problems. He said that it costs the same as the other, less nutritious lunches. This is impossible.

To make food fresh every day requires cooks who know what they're doing. They cost more than people who can cut open boxes of frozen foods and scoop fries out of a deep fryer and into a cardboard serving container. Furthermore, frozen, processed food costs much less than fresh food. So, there's simply no way the fresh lunch costs the same as the processed, junk lunch. I'd bet the good lunch is no less than twice as expensive. In fact, though maybe this reinforces Spurlock's corporate conspiracy theory, I'll bet that the schools get a percentage of the sales of the pre-packaged stuff like candy bars and Gatorade, which means switching to the fresh lunch would cost A LOT more. Nevertheless, Spurlock accuses the junk lunch schools of being in the back pockets of corporations, of not caring about the kids.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that public schools are run by morons. I've been across the desk from more than my share of them. They spend money very foolishly and very corruptly. Their vendors are usually the lowest bidders, who bring the corresponding low quality that comes with low-balling. So, this aspect of Spurlock's thesis is valid. However, to suggest that offering healthy, fresh, junk-free lunches costs no more than offering processed, frozen lunches is obviously inaccurate and is designed to imply that schools know they're hurting kids and they just don't care. It is also designed to elicit alarm among viewers at the sheer hideousness of the corporate influence on public schools. I'm not ready to buy that.

To me, it's pretty simple. Public schools are run by government bureaucrats who are specialists in not rocking the boat. When they actually do something, it is because there is something in it for them. When parents insist that the junk be removed and threaten the jobs of the administrators who don't figure out how to make it happen, the something in it for the bureaucrats becomes keeping their jobs. They'll move then, you can count on it. I'll concede that Spurlock's lie is relatively minor, but it's the principle of the thing. If he'll lie about this, what else has he lied about? I don't have the time or inclination to investigate all of his claims, so I have to take his whole film with a grain of salt,, even worse, and I can't ever trust another film he makes. Such is the price of sacrificing truth for ideology.

As to my assent to Spurlock's thesis, I was dead wrong. Super Size Me showed what I've argued for many years but, instead of emphasizing it, he shoved it aside in favor of his corporate responsibility message. I don't agree with his overall conclousions at all. The culprits in the obesity problem, at the end of the day, are fairly obvious - individual decisions to consume insane portions with massive sugar and fat content, while battling the three-toed sloth for the "inactive animal of the year" award. Sure, McDonald's makes it easier, but the responsibility still rests with the individual. In my view, you can't have a free society and a free market without the responsibility residing with consumers. Buyer beware...period. Unless there is fraud being committed, we all have to live with our decisions. To suppose that individuals shouldn't have the super size option because they're not mentally equipped to make the right choice is insulting. This country was not designed to be a nanny state, though you'd never know it nowadays. In fact, I try not to think about it because I can feel myself sliding on the slippery slope, knowing all too well what's below.

In the end, I'd definitely recommend this movie. From where I stand, we have a major problem on our hands with obesity, and we're all going to be paying for it. Not just those of us who occasionally end up next to a "fast-food victim" in the coach section of an airplane, but all of us. The costs associated with type-2 diabetes are skyrocketing, which means that all of our insurance premiums are going up, and that we'll soon be competing for access to physicians who'll spend most of their time managing blood-sugar. (Once socialized medicine is here, get used to the question, "Would you like to be put on the waiting list?") Obesity is the number two preventable killer behind smoking, and it is expected to be number one within just a few years. And there's the cost of the mental problems that come with obesity - the incidence of depression is much higher among the obese than it is among people of healthy weight. We're all better off if more people are happy and somewhat content with life. So, despite Spurlock's determination to paint corporations as the guilty parties, you can't walk away from this movie without dwelling on your own eating habits and, for parents, the eating habits of your kids. Regardless of who's at fault, Mickey D's isn't going away, which means that the pragmatic among us have to formulate strategies for teaching ourselves and our children to eat healthy in a country where the average person does anything but. Super Size Me is a good shove in the right direction.

In closing, let me just reiterate my simple diet maxim - expend, on average, as much as you consume in order to maintain your weight. Expend more or eat less to lose; do the opposite to gain. Whamo, you're in control. Oh yes, and take a vitamin every day.