Super Size Me
22 May 2004

Morgan Spurlock, director of Super Size Me

Credit:KUS/REX

When Morgan Spurlock decided to find out what would happen to him if he ate nothing but McDonald's fast food for a month, doctors didn't think the experiment would cause their patient too much harm. At most, they reckoned, the 33 year old New York based filmmaker would gain a few pounds and get bored with the diet. Little did Spurlock's medical advisers—a nutritionist, general physician, gastroenterologist, and cardiologist—imagine that a mere month on Big Macs, French fries, and bucket-sized Cokes would be enough to turn a healthy, energetic young man into a wheezing, lethargic blob with a liver well on its way to becoming pâté.

By the end of Super Size Me, a provocative and witty documentary featuring the filmmaker as the guinea pig at the centre of an investigation into the sugar highs and vitamin lows of the Great American Diet, Spurlock's medical professionals are stunned. Thirty days after undergoing extensive initial health and fitness tests, which find him to be in good all round shape, Spurlock is more than 11 kg heavier, grumpy, and depressed. He is also grappling with a variety of physical complaints from chest pains and breathlessness to soaring cholesterol levels and high blood pressure. One of the doctors goes as far as to describe his patient's liver as "obscene."

Inspired by the legal proceedings brought against McDonald's in 2002 by two obese teenagers who held the global fast food giant responsible for their condition, Super Size Me attempts to answer the question "Where does personal responsibility end and corporate responsibility begin?" Sampling the wares of McDonald's restaurants all over America, Spurlock mixes an engaging personal quest with facts and opinions from a range of experts including former US surgeon general David Satcher and the world's Big Mac record holder, Dan Gorske, who has eaten two Big Macs every day for the last 30 years and looks none the worse for it.

While Super Size Me is an inheritor of the Michael Moore school of confrontational, David-and-Goliath style documentary making, Spurlock's technique is in many ways more subtle and his personality more endearing than Moore's. Critics have argued that no one eats McDonald's three times a day. But Spurlock, like Moore, understands the value of extremes when it comes to conveying a serious message.

With its zippy, MTV-like visual dynamics, Super Size Me is undeniably a crowd pleaser. And while many of us could do without the high schlock factor—a close-up on a pool of Spurlock's McVomit and a scene depicting the grease-laden, sloshing entrails of an obese patient undergoing gastric bypass surgery being two of the most memorable examples—the tactic definitely has its uses. It might just about be the best way of persuading teenagers to swap their lunchtime bag of chips for a wholewheat salad sandwich and a bag of mini-carrots.

Copyright 2004 The British Medical Journal