Morgan Spurlock Watch

PCRM

One of Spurlock's favorite sources in his book is the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. After the Center for Science in the Public Interest, PCRM ranks second on his "Acknowledgements" page, and he uses them in both the text and the end notes. He runs an exerpt from a book written by Neal Barnard, the group's founder (p. 93). Barnard also gets a brief appearance in Super Size Me. It's probably safe to say that the group helped out with a good deal of the book's content. See Spurlock's blog here, where he mentions his attendance at PCRM's swanky black-tie fundraising gala.

So what exactly is the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine? They aren't physicans. Less than 5% of the group's membership are actual physicians.

In fact, PCRM is a rather militant animal rights group. Its aim? To end medical research on animals, and to foster public fear of eating cheese and meat with scare campaigns. Through lawsuits, intimidation, and stealth media placement, they're trying to push the vegan lifestyle.

PETA has directed more than $1 million to PCRM over the years. The group has been repeatedly and publicly reprimanded by the American Medical Association for spreading misinformation on the use of animals to test new AIDS treatments. The AMA's president said of PCRM in 1991, "They are neither responsible, nor are they physicians." PCRM has also called for an end to donations to groups like the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association because those groups support testing on animals.

Barnard is a psychiatrist. He has no training in nutrition, diet, or internal medicine. Yet for some reason, Spurlock and others take him seriously when he talks about the health effects of meat and cheese consumption. Barnard has lobbied government agencies to put a "biohazzard" warning label on meat and dairy, and once called cheese "morphine on a cracker." He has said, "there is no room for chicken in a healthy diet." And he's an inductee in the "Animal Rights Hall of Fame."

More disturbing, however, are PCRM's ties to animal rights terrorism. Barnard has engaged in several letter-writing campaigns with a guy named Kevin Kjonaas, who has ties to two animal rights terrorist groups, including the Animal Liberation Front. Kjonaas is now on trial on domestic terrorism charges.

Then there's Jerry Vlasak. Vlasak is a former spokesman for PCRM, and author of several of the group's publications.

Vlasak advocates murdering scientists who use animals for healthcare research. That's not an exaggeration of his position. From the Guardian:

A top adviser to Britain's two most powerful animal rights protest groups caused outrage last night by claiming that the assassination of scientists working in biomedical research would save millions of animals' lives.

To the fury of groups working with animals, Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon and prominent figure in the anti-vivisection movement, told The Observer: 'I think violence is part of the struggle against oppression. If something bad happens to these people [animal researchers], it will discourage others. It is inevitable that violence will be used in the struggle and that it will be effective.'

Vlasak, who likens animal experimentation to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews, said he stood by his claim that: 'I don't think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives. . .

Blogger Brian O'Connor has assembled a few other choice Vlasak quotes:

You can justify, from a political standpoint, any type of violence you want to use." — "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04

"I think that violence and nonviolence are not moral principles, they’re tactics." — "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04

"If someone is killing, on a regular basis, thousands of animals, and if that person can only be stopped in one way by the use of violence, then it is certainly a morally justifiable solution." — "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04

"I think we do need to embrace direct action and violent tactics as part of our movement … I don’t think we ought to be criticizing someone, whether we’re criticizing [them] because they’re writing letters, or whether we criticize them because they’re burning down fur stores or vivisection labs. I think we need to include everybody in that circle." — Animal Rights 2002 convention 6/27/02

"[The police] are protecting the circus, they are protecting the meat and dairy industry, they are protecting the vivisection industry and I equate them in my own mind on a moral and ethical level with the -- no different than say guards in a Nazi concentration camp." — at a panel called "Coping with Law Enforcement" at the Animal Rights 2003 LA convention 8/2/03

"I don’t have any doubt in my mind that there will come a time when we will see violence against animal rights abusers." — "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04.

You can listen to audio of Vlasak here. He rather causually (and chillingly) notes that extremist pro-lifers who assassinate abortion doctors "have a good thing going."

I think this bears repeating: this group is second on the list of acknowledgements in Spurlock's book, people without whom, he writes, "this book would not have been possible."

(PCRM info collected from National Council Against Health Fraud, Activist Cash, and Brian O'Connor.)

More Source Abuse

In Super Size Me, Spurlock interviews Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine. Here's how Sullum describes the interview:

The movie pays virtually no attention to the individualist critique of the war on fat, instead depicting it as a struggle between public-spirited activists and greedy corporations. When Spurlock interviewed me for the movie, I tried to interest him in the paternalism angle. At one point I suggested that it may soon be socially acceptable to publicly hector fat people for their unhealthy habits, just as it is acceptable to hector smokers. The appropriate response in either case, I suggested, is: "Fuck you. Mind your own business." He ended up using that bit of the interview, mainly to establish the background of rising concern about rising weight.

Sullum later viewed Super Size Me at a D.C. film festival, and left with this impression:

I suspect that idea would be alien to most of the audience at the D.C. film festival, which seemed to consist almost entirely of people who buy organic food, take a dim view of SUVs, and think recycling is self-evidently virtuous. Aside from a lone skeptic who was booed back to his seat, Spurlock's sharpest critics were people who loved the movie but wished he had paid more attention to the trash generated by fast food packaging or the connection between socioeconomic status and obesity. Watching Spurlock bask in the praise of all these like-minded people, who were congratulating themselves by congratulating him, left me feeling rather like he did after forcing down his first supersize cheeseburger meal.

Pretty clear where Sullum comes down on the movie's message, isn't it?

Bizarrely, here's how Spurlock characterizes Sullum's take on the obesity issue, in an interview with the L.A. Weekly:

L.A. Weekly: In the film, Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine asks whether it will eventually be socially acceptable to hector fat people the way smokers are hectored now. What do you think about that?

Spurlock: I think that would be terrible. But I think he's just raising the question of where we draw the line between corporate responsibility and personal responsibility. What can I control, and what is so heavily pounded into me through marketing and advertising and the lack of better food in my neighborhood or in my school? Where is that fine line? There are things that have to change.

Either Spurlock is completely ignorant of and oblivious to the idea of personal responsibility, or he deliberately mischaracterized Sullum's position. Neither says much about his credibility. Sullum is a consistent, principled civil libertarian. Here's what he writes about one of Spurlock's favorite themes, that parents are overwhelmed by the marketing and advertsing "pounded" into their children:

Please. If parents don't have the wherewithal to say no when their kids ask for something they saw on TV, their problems go far beyond the risk of chubby offspring.

And here's what Sullum says about the way Spurlock characterized him in that L.A. Weekly interview:

I was startled to see how Spurlock . . . explained my comment.

[...]

Actually, I was saying that how much people weigh is their own business, and that meddling do-gooders -- the heroes of Super Size Me -- ought to be put in their place.

This seems to be a common problem with Spurlock. He regularly attributes claims and opinions to sources that, when checked, take the exact opposite position Spurlock attributes to them.

See here for a similar example from his book.

Poor People Don't Eat Artichokes

Spurlock writes:

The USDA reports that the cost of vegetables and fruit rose 120 percent between 1985 and 2000, while the price of junk like sodas and sweets went up less than 50 percent on average (p. 12)

This may be true, I'm not sure. Spurlock's source is a 2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencier article, and the reporter gives no specific source for the claim, other than the tag "according to the USDA."

Spurlock uses this same S-I article a number of times, but never bothers to doublecheck its assertions. He could have at least cheked with the USDA to verify.

If he had, he'd know that the USDA did commission a highly-publicized study on how much it would cost for the average person to get his full daily requirement of fruits and vegetables.

The answer? Sixty-four cents. Or, about twelve percent of the average American's food budget. There are "127 different ways to eat a serving of fruits and vegetables for less than the price of a 3-ounce candy bar," the study says. The notion that processed food is cheaper than fresh food was dismissed by the study, too: "Researchers found that nearly two-thirds of the fruits and vegetables studied were cheapest in their fresh form."

In fact, according to the USDA, per capita fresh fruit and vegetable consumption has gone up by 20% since the 1970s!

I know what you're thinking. "Doesn't the government count the potato as a vegetable? Isn't most of that increase probably due to french fries and potato chips?"

Actually, no. Check out this table from the USDA (from this report). Potato consumption is included in the "frozen" statisitics, not the fresh (as you might imagine, it is up, by about 21 pounds per year).

This makes sense. Revolutionary improvements in agriculture, shipping, and preserving fresh foods, together with a rapidly growing economy (there's all that awful "consumption" again), have created a market for diverse, fresh produce, and a means of satisfying it.

Typically, nutrition activists' response to this is to point out how hard it is for low-income people to access fresh fruits and vegetables. Indeed, that's Spurlock's next paragraph. He points out that low-income areas are often dotted with fast food joints and convenience stores, but few if any outlets for fresh produce.

Here, he's right. And I sympathize. But I have a solution: We have business models that can deliver good food at low cost to low-income people. They do it by stocking huge inventories at very small mark-ups, and by cutting costs just about everywhere they can. They're called big box stores, and they've been doing it all over the country, except in urban areas. The best in the business is Wal-Mart.

The problem is, every time Wal-Mart attempts to open a Superstore (the Superstores carry a full line of groceries, including fresh produce) in an urban area, it's people like Spurlock and his nutrition activist allies who raise holy hell to prevent it from happening. We've seen it happen in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and here in Washington, D.C.

People like Spurlock want low-income people to have access to fresh, preferably organic, cheap, diverse produce, but only if the means for delivering said produce isn't evil Big Box Retail. Sorry, but that's asking too much.

One nutrition activist I debated a few months ago had an interesting solution -- communism! Or at least a localized application of communism. Her comments on artichokes are particularly amusing.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Evan Williams says there's too much guilt by association in this post. He's probably right. But a subsequent commenter passes along this link, in which Spurlock expresses the very opinion of Wal-Mart I suspected he might. Williams is still probably right. But the post is ultimately right, too.

The Obesity "Crisis"

Spurlock writes:

The United States is the fattest nation on earth. Sixty-five percen of American adults are overweight; 30 percent are obese. According to the American Obesity Association, 127 million are overweight, 60 million Americans are obese and 9 million are "severely obese." In the decade between 1991 and 2001, obesity figures ballooned along with our own figures: from 12 percent of us being obese in 1991 to 21 percent in 2001. Almost double. In ten years. (p. 10)

It's important to note before debunking this that Americans have, on average, put on eight to ten extra pounds over the last 25 years. It's also important to note that in spite of that, we're healthier than we've ever been in the history of the country.

Now to the debunking. A huge part of the "ballooning" Spurlock speaks of has nothing to do with overeating. It's due to the fact that in 1998, the U.S. government redefined what it meant to be obese. The Centers for Disease Countrol lowered the bar. One magic night in 1998, then, 29 million Americans went to bed of "normal" weight, and woke up "overweight" -- without ever gaining a pound. Millions more went to bed "overweight," and woke up "obese." That's not the fault of McDonalds or Frito lay, or Baskin-Robins. It's the result of an alarmist government moving the goalposts to manufacture hysteria. My favorite quote comes from a Washington Post, written shortly after the decision...

"… 97 million adults -- nearly 55 percent of the U.S. population -- would be considered overweight, placing them at increased risk of such health problems as diabetes, elevated blood cholesterol, heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure."

Of course, none of these people's risk for these conditions increased overnight. The government merely drew a largely arbitrary line, and announced that one side of that line would now be healthy, and the other side wouldn't.

Of course, all of these statistics flow from the Body Mass Index, or BMI. BMI is by and large a completely arbitrary measure of health. It doesn't account for age, sex, gender, body type, or ethnicity. It also doesn't distinguish between fat tissue and muscle tissue (the latter is more dense). By now, you've probably heard about how big, muscle-bound athletes are classified as "obese" by the government. By BMI standards, more than half the NBA is obese or overweight. But in fact, any person who works out regularly is likely to fall into the "overweight" or "obese" categories. According to the government, for example, Johnny Depp is overweight. And Tom Cruise is obese. If your build is similar to theirs, you're probably obese or overweight, too (if you're wondering, the government considers me obsese, too -- here's a recent picture). Should give you an idea of how specious a tool the BMI really is.

Look at it this way: Muscle mass is denser than fat mass. If you've ever started a regular workout regimen after a few months of inactivity, you'll know that your weight tends to go up, not down, after the first few weeks. You're building muscle. Which means if ten people of normal build who don't exercise joined a gym, their collective BMI would go up, not down. But they'd be adding to the overweight-obesity statistics.

On it's own website, the Centers for Disease Control writes:

Two people can have the same BMI, but a different percent body fat. A bodybuilder with a large muscle mass and a low percent body fat may have the same BMI as a person who has more body fat because BMI is calculated using weight and height only.

[...]

This is a good reminder that BMI is only one piece of a person's health profile. It is important to talk with your doctor about other measures and risk factors. (e.g., waist circumference, smoking, physical activity level, and diet.)

The CDC's accompanying table shows a sketch of an obviously flabby man and obviously very fit man and admits that according to the government's method of calculating obesity, there is no difference between them. Remember, when people like S purlock say things like "127 million Americans are overweight," this is how they're arriving at those figures.

If the CDC advises against using BMI as the sole indicator of overall health on an individual level, why are we using BMI and only BMI to gauge the overall health of the nation? And why are people like Spurlock throwing these numbers around in an effort to influence public policy?

Spurlock mentions the American Obesity Association. For someone so skeptical of the motivations of corporations, I'm surprised he didn't do a bit more research on AOA.

Just last week, the Seattle Times ran a report on how and why the BMI was lowered in 1998. Guess who was behind it? the American Obesity Association. And a plethora of nutrition activists, drug companies, and professional scolds who had a stake in getting the government to call more of its citizens fat. Writes the Times:

In May 1995, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked 24 experts to write guidelines for diagnosing and treating obesity. The expert panel officially defined obesity as a BMI of 30 or higher, and overweight as a BMI above 25 and below 30. The panel, which included the pharmacologist who created the phen-fen combo, was criticized for its ties to the drug and weight-loss industries.

[...]

At the hearings, Interneuron presented data showing an obesity pandemic and said desperate measures were required to stop it from prematurely killing 300,000 Americans a year.

That controversial figure came from weight-loss experts and researchers who used epidemiological data from decades-old health studies to build the case that excess body fat was a crisis more urgent than even AIDS.

[...]

Also at the hearing was a newly formed group, the American Obesity Association, which built a case for treating obesity as a chronic disease. Funded largely by drug companies, including two involved with Redux, the association was headed by Dr. Richard Atkinson, an internist who advocated gastric bypass for severe obesity and who later founded a company to test for what he believed might be an "obesity virus."

At the hearing, the association positioned itself as a patient-advocacy organization, though it offered no patients to testify for the drug.

There is some evidence that extreme, morbid obesity is on the rise, though it still affects a realtively small percentage of the population. No one is advocating morbid obesity, here. But the idea that we as a nation putting on pounds, and spiraling toward a health care catastrophe just isn't supported by the facts. And when you read somewhere where it seems to be, odds are, the facts you're reading were manufactured and pushed by agents with a financial stake in promoting the hype, agents like the American Obesity Association. Even the Center for Science in the Public Interest, whom Spurlock consults thoughout the book and which is always eager to hype the obesity "threat," doubts the integrity of AOA. Center for Consumer Freedom (disclosure: a food industry-funded group) sheds light on AOA here.

NOTE: A commenter points out that my link to Tom Cruise pointed to a lookalike photo. Here's a picture of Tom Cruise. Not that it does much to undermine the point.

Back to Aspartame

Continuing his assault on artificial sweeteners, Spurlock writes:

"There were far more troubling studies possibly linking aspartame to birth defects and brain tumors, one conducted by the FDA itself as early as 1981, but they were overlooked in the rush to get NutraSweet approved and marketed." (p. 98)

Spurlock again seems to have fallen for an urban legend.

Let's go back to one of Spurlock's own sources: the FDA Consumer newsletter. The issue Spurlock himself cites for another claim says the following:

FDA calls aspartame, sold under trade names such as NutraSweet and Equal, one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved. The agency says the more than 100 toxicological and clinical studies it has reviewed confirm that aspartame is safe for the general population.

Of course, Spurlock writes that the FDA "rushed" the sweetener to market, implying that the agency bowed to political pressure, in which case -- I guess -- we shouldn't believe what it writes.

Okay. Then how 'bout the British medical journal The Lancet? The American Council on Science and Health? MIT? Time magazine?

All of have considered the claims Spurlock publishes as fact, and thoroughly rebuked them as hysterical Internet scaremongering.

The most cursory of Internet research turned these articles up. In fact, a visit to Snopes would have sufficed to find them all. Instead, Spurlock cites the very sorts of quackish, alarmist websites the FDA, respected medical journals, academics, and other journalists caution anyone with a lick of sense from taking seriously.

He's that eager to demonize Big Food.

So what of that study that perported to link aspartame to brain tumors? It was conducted by a couple of Washington University researchers who apparently saw a 10% rise in incidence in brain tumors shortly after the sweetener was put on the U.S. market in the early 1980s. They didn't even check to see if the people who got brain tumors after 1983 had actually consumed any aspartame. Pure, speculative correlation. Bizarrely, they overlooked the fact that that rise was merely the tail end of a decade-long rise in brain cancer that began in the early 1970s -- well before aspartame hit the market. Beginning in the mid-1980s incidents of brain cancer began a decade-long leveling off -- with aspartame use on the rise all the while.

Spurlock, again, bites on an urban legend and Internet hoax. And one that, again, could have been disproven with as little effort as a Google search.

Damn Close to Libel

While discussing how McDonalds' suppliers raise their cattle, Spurlock writes in Don't Eat This Book:

"Leftover bits and pieces [of dead cows] are scooped up, ground together and fed back to the cows. And then those cows are ground up and fed to you." (p. 102)

Actually, this process is called "ruminant feeding," and it has been banned by the FDA since 1997. Spurlock is accusing McDonalds of breaking federal law, and of continuing to break federal law for eight years.

This is a serious accusation, and one for which Spurlock provides no source. Either Spurlock or Putnam, his publisher, should provide an explanation as to how and why this accusation made it into the book.

Spurlock's Sweetener Source Abuse

One of my favorite passages from Don't Eat This Book concerns accusations Spurlock casts against artificial sweeteners. Nearly all of them are based on Internet rumors, urban legends, and one solitary study that has long been discredited.

Spurlock, for example, writes the following:

"The FDA has said aspartame may be linked to some uncommon but troubling side effects, including headaches, hallucinations, panic attacks, dizziness, and mood swings." (p. 98)

Spurlock's source for this is a 1999 edition of an FDA newsletter called the FDA Consumer. Here's what that the article actually says:

FDA calls aspartame, sold under trade names such as NutraSweet and Equal, one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved. The agency says the more than 100 toxicological and clinical studies it has reviewed confirm that aspartame is safe for the general population.

This message would not necessarily be apparent to consumers surfing the Internet, especially those who use Web-based search engines to find information about sugar substitutes or artificial sweeteners. Websites with screaming headlines and well-written text attempt to link aspartame consumption to systemic lupus, multiple sclerosis, vision problems, headaches, fatigue, and even Alzheimer's disease. One report distributed nationally over e-mail systems claims that aspartame-sweetened soft drinks delivered to military personnel during the Persian Gulf War may have prompted Gulf War syndrome.

No way, says FDA, along with many other health organizations such as the American Medical Association.

In other words, Spurlock's own source makes the exact opposite conclusion he attributes to it. The article goes on to debunk each of these hysterical claims, one by one.

Again, Spurlock and/or Putnam should probably explain how such a blatant misreading of a source made it into the book.

Spurlock also cites the Center for Science in the Public Interest as a second source for this claim. Regular readers of my blog by now know that CSPI is Nanny State central, and more than willing to hype up even the most dubious of food scares. Yet even here, Spurlock abuses his own source. Here's what CSPI says about aspartame:

Some people have reported dizziness, hallucinations, or headache after drinking diet soda, but such reports have never been confirmed in controlled studies . . . be wary of claims scattered around the Internet that aspartame is responsible for a wide range of diseases. Most such claims are not supported by studies.

CSPI is somewhat critical of aspartame, but only in the sense that CSPI feels some people falsely believe that switching to aspartame will help them lose weight.

CSPI only mentions the maladies Spurlock associates with aspartame for the purpose of refuting them. That is apparently enough for Spurlock to draw a connection.

At risk of repeating myself, how in the world did such poor sourcing make it to publication?