Wiki

Someone kindly listed this site on Morgan Spurlock's Wikipedia entry.

I clicked over, however, and saw that the body of Spurlock's entry didn't contain a single sentence laying out the position of Super Size Me critics. So I added the following, which I think is a pretty fair assessment of their criticisms:

Spurlock's critics contend that his movie was a dishonest depiction of how fast food -- or any food, really -- fits in with a regular diet. Spurlock deliberately ate 5,000 calories per day, more than twice what's recommended. It isn't difficult, in fact, to eat a McDonalds diet for each meal at under 2,000 calories per day (including a double cheeseburger and fries for dinner). Spurlock also intentionally avoided any physical activity during his McDonalds diet. That such a drastic diet-exercise regimine would cause deleterious effects on his health, critics say, is self-evident. Five thousand calories per day of any food will cause immediate, noticeable weight gain in all but the most serious and rigorous of athletes.

We'll see if it stays up.

Comments

[Tex]

Your entry is sound yet theoretical. As I recall, Les Sayer tried to reproduce Spurlock's 30 day "experiment" and actually managed to loose 17 pounds. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. When Sayer did the eating, he lost weight.

[Tex]

Les has a web diary of his "culture jam" on Spurlock's work. I've included a link to it in the "External Links" section of the Wiki entry on Spurlock.

[John H.]

Hey, Radley. I added a link for this site to a comment in one of Spurlock's entries (way down at the bottom at the moment, I'll try to do better next entry):

http://blogs.indiewire.com/morganspurlock/archives/004904.html

(the comment is dated 08:35AM on Jul 10, 2005, check it out to see if it "disappears")

[dave]

it's gone, suprise suprise

[A. W. View]

I confess: I was the one who added it. Can you tell if you are getting many referrals from it?

[Bryan]

A week later, and your paragraph is still there.

[blueeyes]

Edited your paragraph to read :

"A McDonald's diet near 2,000 calories per day can include a double cheeseburger and fries for dinner, although doing so would involve sacrificing both high-calorie drinks and the trademark of supersizing his meal whenever offered. Spurlock intentionally avoided any physical activity during his McDonalds diet, almost to the point of absurdity."

Sorry if this seems a bit overstated, but I can't come up with a reasonable day worth that involves a non-diet drink and still meets your cap of 2000 calories. In fact, keeping a reasonable variety of food and getting a normal supply of fiber and protein will likely boost the number about 2000 by a small amount.

[dagny]

There was a story recently about a woman who lost weight eating only McDonald's, and I'm pretty sure she kept below 2000 calories (may have even been in the ballpark of 1500): she did drink only Diet Coke (a pretty easy change compared to many involved in dieting) and she didn't get fries. Interesting fact from the McDonald's website: a large order of fries has the same number of calories as a Quarter Pounder with Cheese (a bit over 500). You could eat 3 sandwiches per day at McDonald's and have a good caloric intake. If you add fries and regular coke, you pretty much triple the calories.

But I think everyone knows that and either engages in enough physical activity to make it trivial (lots of people working in fields like construction eat at McDonald's) or they can't be bothered to care about their health -- and honestly, if they don't care, why should McDonald's?

Of course, that's not to say it's the healthiest thing ever in terms of providing vitamins and minerals, and it's pretty high in sodium (though having no fries certainly helps) but it's not nearly as bad as people say. Most of the ill-health effects Spurlock reported came from the drastic change, not only in calories, but also from no meat to lots of meat.

[actus]

" Spurlock deliberately ate 5,000 calories per day, more than twice what's recommended."

How much does McD's recommend we eat?

" Spurlock intentionally avoided any physical activity during his McDonalds diet, almost to the point of absurdity"

I thought he did the average amount of physical activity for an american. Which I do agree is absurd, but not demographically so.

[Ken]

Checked the wiki site, your addition was gone, so I put it back in for you. We'll see if it lasts any longer this time.

[JD]

Cripes, gone again! Spurlock seems to have a fan in "WorldTraveller", who removes pretty much any criticism as soon as it appears under the guise of "maintaining a neutral tone". (Judging from his edit history, he does pretty much nothing but edit Wikipedia - almost 50 edits/day for the last three days alone, although a lot of those are to the same article in quick succession.) There is still some criticism on the page for SSM itself.

[blueeyes]

"How much does McD's recommend we eat?"

They're not specific, but eating 3 combo meals with no deserts will only put you at 2500-3300 calories, saying you go for OJ in the morning, a normal cola with diner and a diet cola with lunch. That's not exactly a perfect setting, but far from unbalanced, particularly since the average person doesn't eat breakfast that often. The high-end of that is pretty unhealthy for a normal person, probably enough to put them at overweight levels, but not much further beyond that.

Anyway, this wiki guy needs to clean up his act.

[Heidi]

Hey,

I have a great link for a video profile on the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. Best known for his 2004 breakout film Super Size Me, he was recently at the SXSW film festival promoting his Oscar nominated film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Filmed in the Austin City Limits Studio, Spurlock talks about filmmaking, blogging and interactivity between the two mediums. Here is a link to the video from the website of the show Docubloggers on the PBS station KLRU in Austin, Texas. Enjoy!

http://www.klru.org/docubloggers/?p=262

OR

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7WN4hu63tzM

-Heidi

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Les has a web diary of his "culture jam" on Spurlock's work. I've included a link to it in the "External Links" section of the Wiki entry on Spurlock.
thanks for the topic very nice

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Cripes, gone again! Spurlock seems to have a fan in "WorldTraveller", who removes pretty much any criticism as soon as it appears under the guise of "maintaining a neutral tone".

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That such a drastic diet-exercise regimine would cause deleterious effects on his health, critics say, is self-evident.

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