yazadjal.com

Here are two reviews of Super Size Me, a documentary in which the filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, eats exclusively at McDonalds for a month to show how obesity / poor health and large fast food corporations are linked.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times. (free registration required)

The arguments in “Super Size Me” will be familiar to readers of Eric 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 McDonald’s before McDonald’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.

Jacob Sullum on TechCentralStation.com

Spurlock presents his exercise in excess as validation of the reasoning behind the unsuccessful lawsuit that two obese New York City teenagers filed against McDonald’s in 2002. He says his binge was aimed at determining whether fast food is “unreasonably dangerous,” which would make it “defective” under product liability law, and whether it causes “injury,” which plaintiffs must demonstrate to recover damages.

Yet in designing his “experiment,” which he admits “may have been a little extreme,” Spurlock paid no heed to the central reason the McDonald’s lawsuit was dismissed. U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet ruled that “any liability based on over-consumption is doomed if the consequences of such over-consumption are common knowledge….If a person knows or should know that eating copious orders of supersized McDonald’s products is unhealthy and may result in weight gain…it is not the place of the law to protect them from their own excesses. Nobody is forced to eat at McDonald’s….Even more pertinent, nobody is forced to supersize their meal or choose less healthy options on the menu.”

Spurlock easily could have eaten three meals a day at McDonald’s while staying below the 2,500 calories his doctor said he needed to maintain his starting weight of 185 pounds. For instance, an Egg McMuffin, orange juice, and coffee for breakfast; a grilled chicken bacon ranch salad and iced tea for lunch; and a double cheeseburger, medium fries, and diet Coke for dinner total fewer than 1,800 calories. By contrast, Spurlock says he consumed some 5,000 calories a day, while deliberately avoiding physical activity. In short, his experiment proves nothing but basic physics.

Somehow I think the NYT view will prevail — over common sense. Whatever happened to the notion of individual responsibility?

I wonder if this is really all that bad as it is made out to be. Dinesh D’Souza recalls this in an interview:

I asked an acquaintance of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.” [Emphasis mine]

Update:

TechCentralStation has a mini site dedicated to the Super Size Con. Good reading stuff there!

Disclaimer: TCS is supported at least partly by McDonalds.

Tech Central Station is supported by sponsoring corporations that share our faith in technology and free markets. Smart application of technology - combined with pro free market, science-based public policy - has the ability to help us solve many of the world’s problems, and so we are grateful to AT&T, Avue Technologies, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, General Motors Corporation, Intel, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, PhRMA, and Qualcomm for their support. All of these corporations are industry leaders that have made great strides in using technology for our betterment, and we are proud to have them as sponsors. However, the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily of any corporation or other organization. (Source)