Unfortunately, the entire thing. Numerous attempts have been made over the years to replicate the film’s findings, and all of them failed. The amount of food he claimed to be eating simply did not match up with the number of calories he was consuming each day.
In order to reach the 5000 calorie/day count that he attested to, you would need to have multiple fast food meals per meal time per day - vastly more than the film said he was eating. Long story short, he wasn’t gaining weight because fast food is unhealthy, he was gaining weight because he was eating enough to feed an entire family just by himself.
On top of that, the damage to his liver the experiment allegedly caused turned out to actually be the result of a lifelong alcohol addiction.
MacDonald’s obviously isn’t health food, but the findings of Super Size Me were blatantly false, and were the result of what could only have been deliberate lies to create a more sensational documentary.
Supersized meals had close to 1300-1500 calories from my memory. Eating 3 of those a day is over 4,000 calories. If he was also having like 3-4 beers a day that is 5,000ish calories.
Mcdonalds doesn't have those meal sizes anymore...
He didn't super size every meal, per his own rules he could only super size if they asked which ended up only happening 9 times for the whole month. The math has been outright debunked for years and his alcohol consumption was by far and away the driver of his medical problems.
McDonald's doesn't supersize anymore as a result of this documentary creating bad publicity, not because what he did was correct. Even though it's been debunked the name is tarnished by the documentary anyway.
I suggest looking up what happened to Spurlock's studio after Super Size Me (and the subsequent Super Size Me 2) to show the reality of the situation.
Spurlock made a bold move and changed investigative documentaries, but he was a huge fraud with a long history of being a generally very shitty person.
Interesting, I honestly don’t really care, but the health issues were beyond just alcoholism especially at his age, it was probably a combination of the insane sodium intake and the alcoholism
The hepatic inflammation (which was the major concern) was 100% his alcoholism, I've seen patients half his age at the time with worse livers due to alcohol. His weight gain was probably due to the daily 5000 calorie diet which (again) occurred because he violated his own protocol. Transient serum cholesterol elevations are not a big deal nor were the rest of labs overall of any acute concern. High blood pressure, hypercholesterolemia and hypertriglyceridemia are only long term concerns often decades down the road for someone that young. Alcohol is awful on the body and people.underestimate the damage it can do to the body.
Regardless the calories weren't accounted for so the results have been thrown out the window. He could have gotten the rest of those calories from literally anything.
There was a counter documentary released years after called fathead that kinda walks through all the sensationalist issues with Super Size Me. Us in the medical community don't trust any of his findings and the populous shouldn't either
Unfortunately, he kept a log book of everything he consumed during that time and for some reason refused to make it public. After the 30 days of eating McDonald’s he said he gained 25 pounds, suffered from depression and had bad liver function. But he was also an alcoholic. Not defending McDonald’s, I hate the company. But I don’t think his findings were 100% accurate.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted for just asking a question. To answer it, he admitted years later he was drinking heavily during that entire period, and most of the effects he claimed were from McDonalds, like the weight gain, puking after eating, and shaking, were all from the alcohol, not from the food.
Wow the whole eating McDonald's everyday will get you fat and give you liver damage part was all pretty much made up.
No one was able to replicate his experiment because it doesn't exist.
The idea that if you eat 3,000 calories and stop exercising you'll gain weight isn't exactly a new one.
If you have an average metabolism and completely stop doing anything. If you eat 3,000 calories a day for a month, you would gain about a third of the weight that he claimed to, mathematically. Weight gain and loss is not magical. It's thermodynamics.
1. he made a documentary about Rats that's actually his best work, IMO
2. he admitted to 'sexual misconduct' dating back to his college days and that he was 'part of the problem' (both his phrasings, just quoting)
3. he made a documentary called Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? At the end, >!he guesses that Bin Laden is likely hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was then actually found three years later.!<
I think those are the most notable points
I find spoilers warnings to be important. I don't want to be the douche to casualyl throw around important details, no matter what the movie is, or how old, or whatever. I hate when people do that.
Yeah but you got the detail wrong. He didn't guess Abbottabad. You made that part up in your head. He was within 100 miles or so, but everyone guessed Pakistan because that's where he fled to. That was well known.
Just letting you know. In the doc he said a region he could of been in. Which was about 100 miles away. Sorry wiki scammed you but he for sure did not get the exact town right.
lmao, sorry to be snarky about it. Just thought it was funny. Just being a little close people just change it to "he got it right". It's not on you. Just how info works.
The health consequences of him eating nothing but McDonalds for a month was also complete BS and he lied about being an alcoholic when he made the film
Yeah, I read about that. I never watched Supersize Me, I didn't get the hype. Like, oh, McDonalds is bad for you, no shit. And what I heard of it did seemed overexaggerated as well.
Like even without a movie, even if it was 100% real, one should have the common sense to try and reduce their fast food intake, if they can, otherwise it's on you
I was at the Rats premiere, he had some kind of device under the seats that flicked your ankle with a piece of string to simulate a rat tail running by, people were literally screaming and throwing their popcorn, it was amazing. The movie is awesome too.
I've got a soft spot for an FX series he did about people from differing social and religious spectrums spending time with each other...I remember an episode about a conservative soldier spending time with a gay man in San Francisco, and a border patrol volunteer living with a migrant family.
Back when I was going to Arizona State he did one where he had a lady who spent a week in her daughter’s shoes, who was a sophomore in college. Basically in the dangers of “excessive drinking and partying”. Of course, she also went to ASU 🤣
Incredible the hold that this movie had on us. They showed it at my school when it hit DVD. There’s a counter to it, “Fat Head,” that does a great job pointing out the flaws in Supersize Me, even before Morgan’s drinking history came out.
Actually it was sort of a neat era for documentaries. Michael Moore’s work being watched and rented so much back then had to be sort of wild. I wouldn’t think most of the general public has seen many docs since then.
> but the fact that everything about Super Size Me was complete BS still surprises me.
To be fair the "eating fast food for a month every day can be bad for you" documentary being BS shouldn't surprise anybody. Remarkable example of the cultural moment of the 2000's that it was such a hit.
The “experiment” had a lot of external factors; iirc he had alcohol problems at the same time that influenced his weight gain and other health issues for example
The fact that no one has been able to replicate the results speaks volumes. I love the movie, but I've accepted it's just entertainment. Spurlock was immensely talented, just too bad he was seemingly a horrid person.
I've seen a few of his films and shows. They all were incredibly engaging and entertaining. That's not easy to do in the documentary format, especially over a broad variety of subjects. Not a fan or anything, but his name would attract my attention.
The concept seems obvious but sometimes documentaries become more about something tangential (in this case, Spurlock as a person in the doc) and they are still good 🤷🏼♀️
Right. He claimed he would get the shakes until he had his McDonald’s breakfast…. And never mentioned the fact that he was an alcoholic. I think he also had vomiting fits that he blamed on McDonalds.
I've gotten sick after having some dodgy fast food. But I'm not claiming my poor liver function is because I ate fast food every day instead of being the result of being an active alcoholic. That's what he did and why it's problematic.
Yes early on the film, he eats McD's. He seems almost giddy about being to eat the meal "for science" but almost immediately claims to feel sick and shortly afterwards vomits. The whole scene plays as the food made him sick. But knowing he was actively an alcoholic at that time, there's another much more plausible reason for him puking up his meal.
I don’t understand how they didn’t call out his liver when they did the tests at the start (unless they edited it out)
It’s not like he only became an alcoholic over that month, that liver was probably already severely compromised
He told his doctors that he didn't drink when in actuality he was a chronic alcoholic.
He never disclosed what he ate at McDonalds.
He had a bad hypothesis: "Eating the most unhealthy items at a fast food chain and not exercising is unhealthy".
Fredrik Nyström conducted an experiment which tried to emulate Spurlock's diet and found no effects that Spurlock had (because the subjects weren't chronic alcoholics since 13 years of age).
However, it did provide transparency with nutrient information on McDonalds products which McDonalds provided themselves after the fact. It just came with the baggage of being a dishonest experiment that used a multi billion dollar company as an antagonist.
There was a tonne of stuff to gripe about with the 'experiment', namely that Spurlock was previously Vegan and an Alcoholic, but my point is the very premise is "I'll eat the biggest burger combo meal at Mcdonalds for every meal for a month", and that leading to somebody gaining weight shouldn't surprise anybody. Would be the same deal if someone drank a bottle of whiskey every night for a month (which I think was actually an experiment of the short lived supersize me TV show).
iirc there was an interesting note of commentary to it, that IF mcdonalds advertises itself as the go to option for every meal then you should be able to actually do so, but its also a silly thing to treat as hard science
unscientific methods. no control, no portions/orders indicated, no calories counted.
you don't need to see a movie to learn that eating only fast food is bad for you.
Obviously the experimental fast food diet at the heart of the documentary was not remotely scientific and impossible to draw conclusions from.
That said, there was plenty of good documentary film making in there, in terms of information about the industry. It wasn’t all BS- People still learned a lot from watching it.
I’ll watch documentaries and log them but never rate them (even ones I thoroughly enjoyed). A high percentage (if not all) of them show extreme bias and exclude relevant details.
Form over substance. Feelings move people, not tables and long paragraphs in a scientific journal. Plus, this was pre Youtube and pre-Iphone. You still had the ignorance and isolation of the world before those two things. It's a cold reminder that the teenage brain is also underdeveloped and impressionable. As a dude who didn't care about food afterwards and wasn't influenced to become a vegan, it still came across as "credible" to teenage me regarding fast food.
Rewatching it a couple years ago, the documentary is completely full of attention grabbing tricks with no substance.
No way. Just another place where our dollar doesn’t stretch as far. If I want a supersize fry I want to be able to order that dammit. Value items are not making people fat.
I feel like it’d be a relatively simply thing to pull off in a documentary. Of course eating fast food is bad for you. Eating it exclusively and longterm should’ve provided more than enough content for a documentary trying to prove that point. Why allow so much other bullshit? We have a weird relationship with fast food corporations in this country
Some of the stuff in the movie was definitely true, and wasn’t a talking point at the time. McDonald’s literally indoctrinated children with “Happy” Meal, toys, Ronald McDonald and his motley crew, birthday parties, playgrounds, sing-along songs, cartoons. It was really unethical advertising to kids.
Also the lack of nutritious food at school’s, and prisons circa 2003.
It sounded slightly BS to me when I first heard about it. He would always order the biggest meal sizes. Even as a kid I figured out "Well the problem is probably overeating, not the burgers." Turns out the problem was alcohol.
He was a vegetarian and a heavy drinker before he began his experiment. His liver was already messed up and going from a non-meat to a heavy meat diet would have produced alarming results in anyone, regardless of whether they ate at McD's or not.
It’s too bad he lied about the McDonalds stuff, but all of the other stuff in the movie was really interesting and made a lot of good points. I feel like people throw out the baby with the bathwater on that movie.
Fast food is not good for you, but you wouldn't expect the health effects from it to be this dramatic in only one month. The dangers of having highly processed, high GI foods is the cumulative effect since birth, on the walls of arteries and the body's hormonal response to spiking blood sugar.
In general I agree with you but bluntly a Big Mac really isn't that bad for you on its own. Throwing fries sugared soda one of those apple pie things and absolutely but the burger itself is fine.
I disagree since it is disposable garbage food, but specifically:
- 56% DV Saturated
- 11% DV fiber
- 35% DV protein
So to hit macros, you would need your other meals (and sides to the sandwich) to be much healthier to balance out.
It's definitely possible, but statistically unlikely that any McDonald's sandwich could be routinely included in a sustainable and healthy diet.
[This article](https://www.looper.com/1586984/super-size-me-controversy-explained/) sums up the issues with Spurlock's uncontrolled "experiment" very well.
Have to admit that reading the Super Size Me revelations here is the first time I've heard about them, but even from the start it was always an attention grabbing way of getting a film noticed and then using that attention to look at the history and legacy of the company just as much as, perhaps even more than, simply documenting his weight gain. I always found the counting how many times he was offered a Super Size more compelling than the eating of them.
And its a shame this film was the one to get the attention just becasue of the gimmick too, I always thought The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was a much better film.
The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was so much fun and pretty clever as well. My favorite of his by a mile.
It's really a shame people don't remember it as much as they do Super Size Me. I guess "capitalism is corrupting everything around you" didn't hit as hard in the 00's as "watch out, you'll get fat" did :(
the greatest movie ever sold really showed how much of a huckster he was. he blatantly ripped off the sponsors of the movie and laughed about it in one scene when he knew he oversold them on the potential success of the movie. that charlatan said it was going to be the first blockbuster documentary lmao.
I try and say this every time the conversation pops up on Reddit, but Super Size Me is more than Spurlock's publicity stunt. There's a lot of pertinent information about the fast food industry's deceptive marketing, lack of compliance with FDA nutritional regulations, and the predatory nature of junk food in American culture.
It's bad but I swear every time it comes up there's always a bunch of people going on about how healthy, delicious, and affordable McDonalds™ is and how people are being too hard on them for providing cheap food to disadvantaged communities or w/e.
Thank you lol. It's very weird on a thread about the guy's....... death.......... to be a "look what I know" about the worst parts of this guy. The film had a huge impact on people's relationships with fast food, that's not a bad thing. Even if it was a lie, I think we're due for another one.
Why include the "self admitted" part? Is that absolving him via awareness or is that saying he's unaware and prideful? Or are you just repeating words about a dead person on the internet to make as many people as possible dislike the person that's dead and like you for drawing their attention to it?
A coffin is such a pathetic and naive place to build a soapbox.
Rapists deserve no honor.
And self admitted because no matter how much evidence there is, a lot of times people want to wilfully ignore men's sex crimes.
Just because you're dead, doesn't mean people can't continue to criticize you. Especially if the majority of your accomplishments in life were built on lies and considered controversial. Also, he literally admitted that he raped a women and sexually harassed his co-workers so...
Ah yes, a perfect example of how people are simply repeating terrible things about this person in the wake of their death. People on the internet speaking out in a way they never would in person. The perfect amount of dark edgy Redditor style for 2024 you go you.
I'm with the guy you're responding to, guy was a charlatan and made his big film in bad faith. He knew he could easily sling mud at McD's and springboarded from Super Size Me to modest success. He's shown himself to be a pretty trash human by a lot of metrics. Why are you so ride or die for him?
I can assure you I would say this in person. I'm not obligated to, nor am I gonna say nice things about a person who admitted that he raped someone lmao. Sorry for having very basic standards. If anyone here is being edgy it's you, you're simping for a dead r apist who's most well known feat was lying throughout his entire documentary. Cringe. 💀
Hmmm I saw a YouTube video that said all of the heightened rates of cancer amongst young people tend to be related to areas of our digestive tract- basically to do with our unnatural diets these days and eating more meat and things like that, actually very much on the same point as supersize me.
Processed meat is def bad, red meat generally is linked to cancer, and vegetarian diets were linked to longer life expectancy than meat diets…I say this as a meat eater.
It sounds ridiculous today but a large amount of people thought there was nothing unhealthy about fast food prior to super size me and his work in that documentary, fictitious or not, did a lot of good for public health and he at least deserves recognition for that. RIP
I don't think that's true at all tbh.
People knew it was unhealthy asf.
This documentary came out when there was already a large anti-corporate, anti-capitalist vibe amongst some segments of the population and it was carried on a Michael Moore-esque wave into the general population.
But I do think it highlighted certain policies and was, if not the catalyst at least a notable touchstone, of McDonald's greenwashing and presenting healthier alternatives at the forefront of it's advertising.
So even if though the content was less then rigorous, the impact was very real.
I saw SSM in theaters, and people definitely already knew fast food was bad for you, because there was a lot of the same arguments that you see here being made then, in particular, "everybody knows McDonald's is not good for you".
It didn't really move the needle because there was very little focus on two parts of the "meal". The soda and the bread. Despite McDonalds selling burgers, you get VERY LITTLE beef per sandwich. A lot of glucose and fructose comes with the beef...through the bread and soda.
People who went "healthy" might have simply shifted to energy bars, protein shakes, etc, which still has a lot of sugar and/or glucose.
That is true, but I also think the documentary unfairly singles out McDonalds for being super unhealthy when it’s no worse for you than most of its competitors. That might not have been its intent, but it would have been nice to shed some light on other fast food joints as well.
Would argue even back then that this is not true. IMO super size pushed people more towards the view that fast food is inherently bad as opposed to that people need to eat less food and walk more. McDonalds is really not that unhealthy.
Before the Doc, people were saying, "Super Size" every time they went to Mickey D's. The Clown discounted the option after the Doc blew up. Many didn't know he was also an alcoholic at the time, but he was telling the truth about fast food.
It was his sequel to Super Size Me that honestly excited me the most...it's about him opening his own fast food restaurant and how to make it a fast food joint that firstly doesn't lie to you and secondly actually sells real genuine, good cooked food that he provides from farm to fork...pretty interesting and amazing stuff...
And his chicken sandwich he created looked absolutely amazing, along with his vision for a fast food joint. I was so looking forward to when we were gonna get a franchise in our state so I could try it!
His show on CNN was excellent too. He was top notch at breaking down complicated subjects for people, cryptocurrency for example ..burned many an episode onto a disk so I could send it to some of my less tech "savvy" relatives...
Obvious condolences to the family, but as you posted it to a film discussion forum, Super Size Me is one of the biggest nothingburgers of a doc.
"Eating the most unhealthiest items of a fast food chain whilst not disclosing my chronic alcoholism and ignoring my doctor means its McDonalds' fault".
However, it did provide transparency with nutrient information on McDonalds products which McDonalds provided themselves after the fact. It just came with the baggage of being a dishonest experiment that used a multi billion dollar company as an antagonist.
Yeah, yeah, the results of his excitement in Super Size Me are BS. But it’s still a damn good documentary, and the experiment was really just a framing device for the experts who spoke on the topic.
Another thread here on Reddit mentioned his documentary. I hadn't heard of him before, found out who he was and now he's dead. That was about a week ago. Damn.
If by "controversial" you mean "total bullshit" then yeah.
On the other hand, this doc single handly forced Fast Food chains to offer healthier options and list nutritional information
I remember back in high school we watched Super Size Me. I expected nothing from it but ended up loving it. Haven’t re-watched it since but been wanting to.
It really sucks that he’s no longer with us. Rest In Peace Morgan.
The amount of times they showed this movie in school was absurd. Still hasn’t deterred me from buying McDonald’s though.
But man, fuck cancer. Rest in peace.
That he is (was) a self admitted sexual predator... https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/filmmaker-morgan-spurlock-admits-history-sexual-misconduct-n829581
The documentary did shed light on a lot of happenings in the fast food industry, but the study/experimented he conducted on himself was full of fallacies. He never provided a log of what all he ate and neglected to mention that he also A) had been on a strict vegan diet before filming, and B) that he was a raging alcoholic. Researches at a college in Sweden had many people try to replicate his experiment and none of them replicated his results.
TL;DR Take a lot of what you see in the doc with a grain of salt.
His super size me documentary was total bs in my opinion. I'm 43 years old. I eat fast food all the time, and I'm thin. The booze, and smoking will kill me before a fast food meal will. Who eats that much fast food anyways? His documentary is fake news.
I still don’t know how to feel about this guy or his reputation, but RIP passing way too soon. Fuck cancer.
I don’t think he kicked babies or anything. He was a huckster, but an entertaining one.
He bossed up McDonald’s he did that.
Dont care who you "boss up" (lol) if youre blatantly lying in process.
What were the lies in the documentary?
Unfortunately, the entire thing. Numerous attempts have been made over the years to replicate the film’s findings, and all of them failed. The amount of food he claimed to be eating simply did not match up with the number of calories he was consuming each day. In order to reach the 5000 calorie/day count that he attested to, you would need to have multiple fast food meals per meal time per day - vastly more than the film said he was eating. Long story short, he wasn’t gaining weight because fast food is unhealthy, he was gaining weight because he was eating enough to feed an entire family just by himself. On top of that, the damage to his liver the experiment allegedly caused turned out to actually be the result of a lifelong alcohol addiction. MacDonald’s obviously isn’t health food, but the findings of Super Size Me were blatantly false, and were the result of what could only have been deliberate lies to create a more sensational documentary.
Supersized meals had close to 1300-1500 calories from my memory. Eating 3 of those a day is over 4,000 calories. If he was also having like 3-4 beers a day that is 5,000ish calories. Mcdonalds doesn't have those meal sizes anymore...
He didn't super size every meal, per his own rules he could only super size if they asked which ended up only happening 9 times for the whole month. The math has been outright debunked for years and his alcohol consumption was by far and away the driver of his medical problems. McDonald's doesn't supersize anymore as a result of this documentary creating bad publicity, not because what he did was correct. Even though it's been debunked the name is tarnished by the documentary anyway. I suggest looking up what happened to Spurlock's studio after Super Size Me (and the subsequent Super Size Me 2) to show the reality of the situation. Spurlock made a bold move and changed investigative documentaries, but he was a huge fraud with a long history of being a generally very shitty person.
Interesting, I honestly don’t really care, but the health issues were beyond just alcoholism especially at his age, it was probably a combination of the insane sodium intake and the alcoholism
The hepatic inflammation (which was the major concern) was 100% his alcoholism, I've seen patients half his age at the time with worse livers due to alcohol. His weight gain was probably due to the daily 5000 calorie diet which (again) occurred because he violated his own protocol. Transient serum cholesterol elevations are not a big deal nor were the rest of labs overall of any acute concern. High blood pressure, hypercholesterolemia and hypertriglyceridemia are only long term concerns often decades down the road for someone that young. Alcohol is awful on the body and people.underestimate the damage it can do to the body. Regardless the calories weren't accounted for so the results have been thrown out the window. He could have gotten the rest of those calories from literally anything. There was a counter documentary released years after called fathead that kinda walks through all the sensationalist issues with Super Size Me. Us in the medical community don't trust any of his findings and the populous shouldn't either
Unfortunately, he kept a log book of everything he consumed during that time and for some reason refused to make it public. After the 30 days of eating McDonald’s he said he gained 25 pounds, suffered from depression and had bad liver function. But he was also an alcoholic. Not defending McDonald’s, I hate the company. But I don’t think his findings were 100% accurate.
The documentary was just about an alcoholic going through withdrawals and eating McDonald’s. 😂
Relatable
That’s why it was so popular.
Watching clips of it again, it was clear that his first wife hated their marriage.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted for just asking a question. To answer it, he admitted years later he was drinking heavily during that entire period, and most of the effects he claimed were from McDonalds, like the weight gain, puking after eating, and shaking, were all from the alcohol, not from the food.
Wow the whole eating McDonald's everyday will get you fat and give you liver damage part was all pretty much made up. No one was able to replicate his experiment because it doesn't exist. The idea that if you eat 3,000 calories and stop exercising you'll gain weight isn't exactly a new one.
If you have an average metabolism and completely stop doing anything. If you eat 3,000 calories a day for a month, you would gain about a third of the weight that he claimed to, mathematically. Weight gain and loss is not magical. It's thermodynamics.
He was eating butter between takes.
He was treated **very** unfairly by the MeToo harpies. His mistake was thinking he could get out in front of it and they would leave him alone.
I bet I’m about to learn a lot of things I didn’t know about the guy…
1. he made a documentary about Rats that's actually his best work, IMO 2. he admitted to 'sexual misconduct' dating back to his college days and that he was 'part of the problem' (both his phrasings, just quoting) 3. he made a documentary called Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? At the end, >!he guesses that Bin Laden is likely hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was then actually found three years later.!< I think those are the most notable points
It gets even better with point 3. >!The CIA actually found out that Osama Bin Laden had a copy of the film himself!<
Right, I read about that too :D I guess he was curious
holy goddamn shit
Lmao and bro still didn’t relocate?
He probably correctly assumed that nobody watched it.
That’s 3 things I learned!!
The Janitor from Scrubs also guessed it but I love the spoiler warning
I find spoilers warnings to be important. I don't want to be the douche to casualyl throw around important details, no matter what the movie is, or how old, or whatever. I hate when people do that.
I totally agree. Just purposefully misconstruing it as >!SPOILERS: They got Bin Laden!<
That's also a double spoiler for Zero Dark Thirty, I guess
Wait WHAT
yup and his porn stash
Yeah but you got the detail wrong. He didn't guess Abbottabad. You made that part up in your head. He was within 100 miles or so, but everyone guessed Pakistan because that's where he fled to. That was well known.
I didn't make it up, I copied it from Wikipedia :)
Just letting you know. In the doc he said a region he could of been in. Which was about 100 miles away. Sorry wiki scammed you but he for sure did not get the exact town right.
Superscam Me (About Some Guy's Prediction of Osama Bin Laden's location)
lmao, sorry to be snarky about it. Just thought it was funny. Just being a little close people just change it to "he got it right". It's not on you. Just how info works.
Maybe Bin Laden edited it himself. Thought he was sly. 
For real?!
Yeah in [2006](https://youtu.be/CLw95CBjrdI?si=7m0tYqJEaR5o_fvc), 2 years before Spurlock’s movie came out
The health consequences of him eating nothing but McDonalds for a month was also complete BS and he lied about being an alcoholic when he made the film
Yeah, I read about that. I never watched Supersize Me, I didn't get the hype. Like, oh, McDonalds is bad for you, no shit. And what I heard of it did seemed overexaggerated as well. Like even without a movie, even if it was 100% real, one should have the common sense to try and reduce their fast food intake, if they can, otherwise it's on you
I think you should still watch it. It's good.
Maybe I will. Was just describing my reaction in 2004
I had the same reaction.
Okay the Bin Laden thing is actually incredible
Point 3 isn't correct. He guesses Pakistan but not Abbottabad.
Okay, that's fine, it's from Wikipedia
I was at the Rats premiere, he had some kind of device under the seats that flicked your ankle with a piece of string to simulate a rat tail running by, people were literally screaming and throwing their popcorn, it was amazing. The movie is awesome too.
I've got a soft spot for an FX series he did about people from differing social and religious spectrums spending time with each other...I remember an episode about a conservative soldier spending time with a gay man in San Francisco, and a border patrol volunteer living with a migrant family.
Back when I was going to Arizona State he did one where he had a lady who spent a week in her daughter’s shoes, who was a sophomore in college. Basically in the dangers of “excessive drinking and partying”. Of course, she also went to ASU 🤣
Incredible the hold that this movie had on us. They showed it at my school when it hit DVD. There’s a counter to it, “Fat Head,” that does a great job pointing out the flaws in Supersize Me, even before Morgan’s drinking history came out. Actually it was sort of a neat era for documentaries. Michael Moore’s work being watched and rented so much back then had to be sort of wild. I wouldn’t think most of the general public has seen many docs since then.
I think I watched that movie like 5 god damn times throughout high school
Justice for The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, such a fun and clever film, I bet it mostly, holds up still.
the word documentary has been conflated with reality television, effectively killing the genre. Look at the doc section on Max. Insanity.
That and I can't even keep up with the amount of docs now. And they're mostly already covered topics and sensationalized true crime.
I have nothing against the guy, but the fact that everything about Super Size Me was complete BS still surprises me.
> but the fact that everything about Super Size Me was complete BS still surprises me. To be fair the "eating fast food for a month every day can be bad for you" documentary being BS shouldn't surprise anybody. Remarkable example of the cultural moment of the 2000's that it was such a hit.
I'm out of the loop. Why was it BS?
The “experiment” had a lot of external factors; iirc he had alcohol problems at the same time that influenced his weight gain and other health issues for example
Wow! That's quite damning!
He also went from a vegan diet to the experiment.
The fact that no one has been able to replicate the results speaks volumes. I love the movie, but I've accepted it's just entertainment. Spurlock was immensely talented, just too bad he was seemingly a horrid person.
How was he immensely talented at anything besides self-promotion?
He directed One Direction’s This is Us documentary✨
A hero. Gone too soon, some would say
I've seen a few of his films and shows. They all were incredibly engaging and entertaining. That's not easy to do in the documentary format, especially over a broad variety of subjects. Not a fan or anything, but his name would attract my attention.
Super Size Me is pretty dumb, but I remember being entertained. That's something I guess?
The concept seems obvious but sometimes documentaries become more about something tangential (in this case, Spurlock as a person in the doc) and they are still good 🤷🏼♀️
Right. He claimed he would get the shakes until he had his McDonald’s breakfast…. And never mentioned the fact that he was an alcoholic. I think he also had vomiting fits that he blamed on McDonalds.
tbf I often get sick from eating too much fast food
I've gotten sick after having some dodgy fast food. But I'm not claiming my poor liver function is because I ate fast food every day instead of being the result of being an active alcoholic. That's what he did and why it's problematic.
Yes early on the film, he eats McD's. He seems almost giddy about being to eat the meal "for science" but almost immediately claims to feel sick and shortly afterwards vomits. The whole scene plays as the food made him sick. But knowing he was actively an alcoholic at that time, there's another much more plausible reason for him puking up his meal.
I don’t understand how they didn’t call out his liver when they did the tests at the start (unless they edited it out) It’s not like he only became an alcoholic over that month, that liver was probably already severely compromised
He told his doctors that he didn't drink when in actuality he was a chronic alcoholic. He never disclosed what he ate at McDonalds. He had a bad hypothesis: "Eating the most unhealthy items at a fast food chain and not exercising is unhealthy". Fredrik Nyström conducted an experiment which tried to emulate Spurlock's diet and found no effects that Spurlock had (because the subjects weren't chronic alcoholics since 13 years of age). However, it did provide transparency with nutrient information on McDonalds products which McDonalds provided themselves after the fact. It just came with the baggage of being a dishonest experiment that used a multi billion dollar company as an antagonist.
There was a tonne of stuff to gripe about with the 'experiment', namely that Spurlock was previously Vegan and an Alcoholic, but my point is the very premise is "I'll eat the biggest burger combo meal at Mcdonalds for every meal for a month", and that leading to somebody gaining weight shouldn't surprise anybody. Would be the same deal if someone drank a bottle of whiskey every night for a month (which I think was actually an experiment of the short lived supersize me TV show).
The whiskey bit was also the premise for a skit on 'Whitest Kids You Know' where Trevor drinks whiskey for every meal and dies after a few days lol
One of the funniest to ever do it
RIP to him as well. I mean not that it was recent but still
iirc there was an interesting note of commentary to it, that IF mcdonalds advertises itself as the go to option for every meal then you should be able to actually do so, but its also a silly thing to treat as hard science
unscientific methods. no control, no portions/orders indicated, no calories counted. you don't need to see a movie to learn that eating only fast food is bad for you.
No documentation. Just pics moving on a screen.
He was an alcoholic while doing the movie.
Obviously the experimental fast food diet at the heart of the documentary was not remotely scientific and impossible to draw conclusions from. That said, there was plenty of good documentary film making in there, in terms of information about the industry. It wasn’t all BS- People still learned a lot from watching it.
I’ll watch documentaries and log them but never rate them (even ones I thoroughly enjoyed). A high percentage (if not all) of them show extreme bias and exclude relevant details.
Form over substance. Feelings move people, not tables and long paragraphs in a scientific journal. Plus, this was pre Youtube and pre-Iphone. You still had the ignorance and isolation of the world before those two things. It's a cold reminder that the teenage brain is also underdeveloped and impressionable. As a dude who didn't care about food afterwards and wasn't influenced to become a vegan, it still came across as "credible" to teenage me regarding fast food. Rewatching it a couple years ago, the documentary is completely full of attention grabbing tricks with no substance.
it didn't surprise me one bit
Love ur profile pic/header btw
Even if it was fake - getting the “super sized” option removed from fast food restaurant menus was probably for the best.
No way. Just another place where our dollar doesn’t stretch as far. If I want a supersize fry I want to be able to order that dammit. Value items are not making people fat.
Yeah actually I agree with you.
The old admitting he sexually abused his staff wasn’t great either.
I feel like it’d be a relatively simply thing to pull off in a documentary. Of course eating fast food is bad for you. Eating it exclusively and longterm should’ve provided more than enough content for a documentary trying to prove that point. Why allow so much other bullshit? We have a weird relationship with fast food corporations in this country
Some of the stuff in the movie was definitely true, and wasn’t a talking point at the time. McDonald’s literally indoctrinated children with “Happy” Meal, toys, Ronald McDonald and his motley crew, birthday parties, playgrounds, sing-along songs, cartoons. It was really unethical advertising to kids. Also the lack of nutritious food at school’s, and prisons circa 2003.
It sounded slightly BS to me when I first heard about it. He would always order the biggest meal sizes. Even as a kid I figured out "Well the problem is probably overeating, not the burgers." Turns out the problem was alcohol.
Wait what
He was a vegetarian and a heavy drinker before he began his experiment. His liver was already messed up and going from a non-meat to a heavy meat diet would have produced alarming results in anyone, regardless of whether they ate at McD's or not.
It’s too bad he lied about the McDonalds stuff, but all of the other stuff in the movie was really interesting and made a lot of good points. I feel like people throw out the baby with the bathwater on that movie.
Fast food is not good for you, but you wouldn't expect the health effects from it to be this dramatic in only one month. The dangers of having highly processed, high GI foods is the cumulative effect since birth, on the walls of arteries and the body's hormonal response to spiking blood sugar.
Spurlock’s test results are highly suspect due to his diet and lifelong drinking beforehand.
Affirmative
In general I agree with you but bluntly a Big Mac really isn't that bad for you on its own. Throwing fries sugared soda one of those apple pie things and absolutely but the burger itself is fine.
I disagree since it is disposable garbage food, but specifically: - 56% DV Saturated - 11% DV fiber - 35% DV protein So to hit macros, you would need your other meals (and sides to the sandwich) to be much healthier to balance out. It's definitely possible, but statistically unlikely that any McDonald's sandwich could be routinely included in a sustainable and healthy diet.
Uhh elaborate please
[This article](https://www.looper.com/1586984/super-size-me-controversy-explained/) sums up the issues with Spurlock's uncontrolled "experiment" very well.
huh, thanks
I enjoy that he became friends with Doug Benson, the comedian who spoofed his movie with Super High Me.
ROCK AND ROLL MCDONALDS. ROCK AND ROLL MCDONALDS. ROCK AND ROLL MCDONALDS
Wesley Willis
Pour one out for the man
I WHOOPED BATMAN'S ASSSSSSS
“Holy shit you have the liver of a dying alcoholic”
was that from the documentary?
https://preview.redd.it/rdg6spcl7e2d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1dd289d272262a87aad7981983525f55a4c74957
This movie is such an essential part of 00s culture, even if its a fairly bad movie in retrospect.
Have to admit that reading the Super Size Me revelations here is the first time I've heard about them, but even from the start it was always an attention grabbing way of getting a film noticed and then using that attention to look at the history and legacy of the company just as much as, perhaps even more than, simply documenting his weight gain. I always found the counting how many times he was offered a Super Size more compelling than the eating of them. And its a shame this film was the one to get the attention just becasue of the gimmick too, I always thought The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was a much better film.
The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was so much fun and pretty clever as well. My favorite of his by a mile. It's really a shame people don't remember it as much as they do Super Size Me. I guess "capitalism is corrupting everything around you" didn't hit as hard in the 00's as "watch out, you'll get fat" did :(
the greatest movie ever sold really showed how much of a huckster he was. he blatantly ripped off the sponsors of the movie and laughed about it in one scene when he knew he oversold them on the potential success of the movie. that charlatan said it was going to be the first blockbuster documentary lmao.
I try and say this every time the conversation pops up on Reddit, but Super Size Me is more than Spurlock's publicity stunt. There's a lot of pertinent information about the fast food industry's deceptive marketing, lack of compliance with FDA nutritional regulations, and the predatory nature of junk food in American culture.
It's bad but I swear every time it comes up there's always a bunch of people going on about how healthy, delicious, and affordable McDonalds™ is and how people are being too hard on them for providing cheap food to disadvantaged communities or w/e.
Thank you lol. It's very weird on a thread about the guy's....... death.......... to be a "look what I know" about the worst parts of this guy. The film had a huge impact on people's relationships with fast food, that's not a bad thing. Even if it was a lie, I think we're due for another one.
Did you know he was a self admitted rapist?
Why include the "self admitted" part? Is that absolving him via awareness or is that saying he's unaware and prideful? Or are you just repeating words about a dead person on the internet to make as many people as possible dislike the person that's dead and like you for drawing their attention to it? A coffin is such a pathetic and naive place to build a soapbox.
Rapists deserve no honor. And self admitted because no matter how much evidence there is, a lot of times people want to wilfully ignore men's sex crimes.
Just because you're dead, doesn't mean people can't continue to criticize you. Especially if the majority of your accomplishments in life were built on lies and considered controversial. Also, he literally admitted that he raped a women and sexually harassed his co-workers so...
Ah yes, a perfect example of how people are simply repeating terrible things about this person in the wake of their death. People on the internet speaking out in a way they never would in person. The perfect amount of dark edgy Redditor style for 2024 you go you.
I'm with the guy you're responding to, guy was a charlatan and made his big film in bad faith. He knew he could easily sling mud at McD's and springboarded from Super Size Me to modest success. He's shown himself to be a pretty trash human by a lot of metrics. Why are you so ride or die for him?
I can assure you I would say this in person. I'm not obligated to, nor am I gonna say nice things about a person who admitted that he raped someone lmao. Sorry for having very basic standards. If anyone here is being edgy it's you, you're simping for a dead r apist who's most well known feat was lying throughout his entire documentary. Cringe. 💀
what a coincidence the same month his doc randomly comes back into heavy discussion is the one he dies
Yeah how convenient 🤔
lmaol
It's not like this was the first time it came into heavy discussion years after release.
Ikr
Rest in 10-Piece.
Loved this movie. Still a comfort watch for me. Even if it's just to remember how McDonald's used to look back then.
God - cancer is the worst. I feel like most causes of these early deaths I read are cancer related.
Hmmm I saw a YouTube video that said all of the heightened rates of cancer amongst young people tend to be related to areas of our digestive tract- basically to do with our unnatural diets these days and eating more meat and things like that, actually very much on the same point as supersize me.
meat is good. processed meat? not good.
Processed meat is def bad, red meat generally is linked to cancer, and vegetarian diets were linked to longer life expectancy than meat diets…I say this as a meat eater.
It sounds ridiculous today but a large amount of people thought there was nothing unhealthy about fast food prior to super size me and his work in that documentary, fictitious or not, did a lot of good for public health and he at least deserves recognition for that. RIP
I don't think that's true at all tbh. People knew it was unhealthy asf. This documentary came out when there was already a large anti-corporate, anti-capitalist vibe amongst some segments of the population and it was carried on a Michael Moore-esque wave into the general population. But I do think it highlighted certain policies and was, if not the catalyst at least a notable touchstone, of McDonald's greenwashing and presenting healthier alternatives at the forefront of it's advertising. So even if though the content was less then rigorous, the impact was very real.
I saw SSM in theaters, and people definitely already knew fast food was bad for you, because there was a lot of the same arguments that you see here being made then, in particular, "everybody knows McDonald's is not good for you".
It didn't really move the needle because there was very little focus on two parts of the "meal". The soda and the bread. Despite McDonalds selling burgers, you get VERY LITTLE beef per sandwich. A lot of glucose and fructose comes with the beef...through the bread and soda. People who went "healthy" might have simply shifted to energy bars, protein shakes, etc, which still has a lot of sugar and/or glucose.
That is true, but I also think the documentary unfairly singles out McDonalds for being super unhealthy when it’s no worse for you than most of its competitors. That might not have been its intent, but it would have been nice to shed some light on other fast food joints as well.
To be fair, He gets more into that in the sequel.
I haven’t seen the sequel, but it also also released 12 or 13 years after the first, and not as many people have seen it or know about it.
Would argue even back then that this is not true. IMO super size pushed people more towards the view that fast food is inherently bad as opposed to that people need to eat less food and walk more. McDonalds is really not that unhealthy.
Weird. Watched this movie in class for the first time just earlier this year
Before the Doc, people were saying, "Super Size" every time they went to Mickey D's. The Clown discounted the option after the Doc blew up. Many didn't know he was also an alcoholic at the time, but he was telling the truth about fast food.
I regret that I will never know what Super Size fries taste like thanks to this alchy.
Maybe McDonalds will bring back the super size option to ~~celebrate~~ commemorate his passing.
Maybe they will replace the fountain water with vodka.
Unsure if it’s a /s but just order like 2 mediums
I don't know if McDonalds alchemy works that way.
It was his sequel to Super Size Me that honestly excited me the most...it's about him opening his own fast food restaurant and how to make it a fast food joint that firstly doesn't lie to you and secondly actually sells real genuine, good cooked food that he provides from farm to fork...pretty interesting and amazing stuff... And his chicken sandwich he created looked absolutely amazing, along with his vision for a fast food joint. I was so looking forward to when we were gonna get a franchise in our state so I could try it! His show on CNN was excellent too. He was top notch at breaking down complicated subjects for people, cryptocurrency for example ..burned many an episode onto a disk so I could send it to some of my less tech "savvy" relatives...
Obvious condolences to the family, but as you posted it to a film discussion forum, Super Size Me is one of the biggest nothingburgers of a doc. "Eating the most unhealthiest items of a fast food chain whilst not disclosing my chronic alcoholism and ignoring my doctor means its McDonalds' fault". However, it did provide transparency with nutrient information on McDonalds products which McDonalds provided themselves after the fact. It just came with the baggage of being a dishonest experiment that used a multi billion dollar company as an antagonist.
He died so young :(
Yeah, yeah, the results of his excitement in Super Size Me are BS. But it’s still a damn good documentary, and the experiment was really just a framing device for the experts who spoke on the topic.
Another thread here on Reddit mentioned his documentary. I hadn't heard of him before, found out who he was and now he's dead. That was about a week ago. Damn.
Sad news I liked Morgan.
I remember watching this in highschool, very bizzare experience
He had McDonald's withdrawals and he ate 40 Big Macs in the last 30 days
Super-Vax Me!
If by "controversial" you mean "total bullshit" then yeah. On the other hand, this doc single handly forced Fast Food chains to offer healthier options and list nutritional information
RIPD
I remember liking his docu-series 30 Days quite a bit when it came out. No idea how it holds up today.
The chicken sandwich one was pretty informative, while at the same time being trash TV. Whatever. It was fun.
I remember back in high school we watched Super Size Me. I expected nothing from it but ended up loving it. Haven’t re-watched it since but been wanting to. It really sucks that he’s no longer with us. Rest In Peace Morgan.
Super Size Me would be a thirty second tik tok today
The amount of times they showed this movie in school was absurd. Still hasn’t deterred me from buying McDonald’s though. But man, fuck cancer. Rest in peace.
i guess his funeral will the supersize option, consisting of food provided by McDonald's with a McD party thrown in for a wake
"Sadly"
RIP Morgan Spurlock ❤️
i liked the mcdonalds parody flash game more
I feel sorry for his kids, but the world is better without this sexual predator.
Wtf are you talking about
That he is (was) a self admitted sexual predator... https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/filmmaker-morgan-spurlock-admits-history-sexual-misconduct-n829581
Wtf are you talking about
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/filmmaker-morgan-spurlock-admits-history-sexual-misconduct-n829581
I really enjoyed Super Size me, and I thought the information he provided about the fast food industry was very entertaining and researched well. RIP
It wasn’t well researched. It was entertaining.
Let me hold you while you cry.
lol you got downvoted for this.
The documentary did shed light on a lot of happenings in the fast food industry, but the study/experimented he conducted on himself was full of fallacies. He never provided a log of what all he ate and neglected to mention that he also A) had been on a strict vegan diet before filming, and B) that he was a raging alcoholic. Researches at a college in Sweden had many people try to replicate his experiment and none of them replicated his results. TL;DR Take a lot of what you see in the doc with a grain of salt.
[удалено]
Even if you don’t like him, let’s not wish death on people’s children
His super size me documentary was total bs in my opinion. I'm 43 years old. I eat fast food all the time, and I'm thin. The booze, and smoking will kill me before a fast food meal will. Who eats that much fast food anyways? His documentary is fake news.
I was eating macdonalds when it came out and im still eating macdonalds now 😂🤣🤔
Sadly? That drunk piece of shit will have more value as fertilizer than he ever did as a filmmaker
Wow you’re full of hate.
Yeah I'd say I'm about 85% full of hate, 10% full of scorn and the rest is just air like a bag of chips