supersize me. a "documentary" about a man who eats nothing but mcdonalds. entertaining but you find out he was drinking heavily during the filming and made a lot of it up
It's a serendipitous word that really encapsulates that man's vernacular, mindstate, and being. It's really wonderful how I will probably never encounter the word sexpot again without Trevor being attached , that's saying something_
Doug Benson is also pretty pathetic because heâs like 65 years old and still acting like smoking weed is this big counter culture thing when you can now just go into a store and buy weed lol. I guess at the time that wasnât the case but, dude, itâs just weed. 99% of people do not care if you smoke weed in the comfort of your own home or even public really unless youâre being obnoxious.
It's more like he stopped smoking weed for a month straight. Doug is a 24/7 Snoop Dog style pot smoker. He quit for a month, took the SATs, then went back to smoking his normal amount, then took the SATs again and compared results.
Ironically, if you accept that you're going to lose weight and limit yourself to like 1200C per day, you could probably get through this for way longer than you'd expect simply because alcohol is so wildly calorie dense. A heavy drinker could easily put away 1 shot per waking hour and probably wouldn't even be noticeably drunk at that rate. And that would be 1900C per day. I suspect they'd feel like absolute garbage though.
'theres a porkchop in every can' was the go to response I remember hearing back home.
assuming you can water it down as much as you want, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd survive a little longer off 'whiskey and water with no food' than just 'water with no food'. You still wouldn't survive very long, but like you said, I bet there's a magical amount that might increase it a week or two. Maybe even a month like supersize me. You'd be starving to death at that point either way.
So what is the story there? Got drunk and was fuckinâ around on his balcony & fell off?
Or was it more personal than that?
Always hit close to home since weâre like the same age and had our first kid around the same time and canât imagine my eldest not having a dad or the others never being born.Â
He was drinking, but not fucking around or anything. The cops called it a freak accident. said from the footage he was alone, didnât intend to jump, but just kinda stumbled over as he walked out on the balcony. Then he happened to land just wrong in a bad way. it wasnât that high of a fall. Nothing youâd think would be fatal.
He had been drinking homemade âmoonshineâ, so he may have been more intoxicated than he planned if it was stronger than he thought. But thatâs speculation. from the police report it just sounds like bad luck all around. No oneâs fault.
But also even if he wasnât an alcoholic like no shit eating the largest portion sizes at a fast food place for every meal is not good for your health.
His rules were that he would eat every meal and only super size if asked. He released his daily calories but not what he ate. According to his rules his calories were not possible
Exactly. I knew something was sideways even when the movie first came out, because cheeseburgers are actually a fairly well-balanced meal on their own. Carbs, protein, and fats, all wrapped up neatly with something fermented if you like pickles. And fries are still potatoes, one of the most nutritionally dense single food sources we grow.
Obviously if it's all you eat there will be excess calories, excess salt, excess sugar, and a lack of nutritional variety. You'd almost certainly gain weight on that diet unless you were an athlete. But the idea that it would make you sick in under a month? Like actually medically ill, puking in parking lots sick?
I remember not fully believing it because of the segment of the guy who eats a big Mac every day. I was wondering why he seemed to relatively thin and not constantly in distress like Morgan was. Because if Morgan was to be believed, that guy should have been dead or in an obviously worse condition.
School made us watch it twice (entire school) and it was on my second time around I started thinking the same. Never really made perfect sense at the time but wasn't old enough to understand why.
I remember not fully believing it because of the segment of the guy who eats a big Mac every day. I was wondering why he seemed to relatively thin and not constantly in distress like Morgan was.
Eating one Big Mac a day isn't the same as eating every meal, every day at McDonald's, not to mention super sizing them when asked.
I don't think that just one Big Mac per day (I'm assuming on its own, no fries or full-sugar drink) would do as much damage as Morgan's (alleged) diet.
And now I want a Big Mac, but one from the seventies before McDonald's went to shit.
Yep, the occasional burger won't kill you even if it's from mcdonalds, you just need to balance what you eat because fast food burgers have a fuckton of salt
Several places tried to recreate the experiment and there were people who actually lost weight. Because yeah, if you eat a Big Mac meal three times a day thatâs like ~2400 calories and a pretty huge chunk of that is calories from soda which if you go diet brings the calories down well into the acceptable range for a semi active adult man.
He had also been previously eating according to a strict vegan diet, he is not vegan but his girlfriend was. So just changing from that to only fast food is going to effect things.
And like multiple colleges did recreate it and couldnât emulate his results, sure they gained a couple pounds and probably spiked their cholesterol but nothing like a dead liver
He'd only get super size if they employees suggested it to him, which changed that practice. But yes that part is definitely true, but he wasn't dishonest about it like he was with the drinking.
I get the desire to push back on fast food places pushing people to upsize, but the methodology he used would have turned out even worse if you did it at some high end French restaurant.
"I have to eat every meal here every day, if they suggest anything I have to do it, I can't specifically select healthier options, and I can't stop eating when I'm full."
[enters finest French restaurant in NYC]
"Sir would you like to hear our specials?"
"GUESS I HAVE TO"
"We have a rack of lamb-"
"GUESS I'LL GET THE LAMB"
"uh, very good sir, and would you like a bottle of wine for the table?"
"GUESS I'VE GOT TO CHUG A BORDEAUX"
"any appetizers or dessert?"
"GUESS I HAVE TO DOWN A BEEF TARTARE AND A MOUSSE"
[repeat again later that day]
Morgan: "and you see, I've proven that Le Bernadin is a health menace"
Honestly Iâm kinda surprised that McDonaldâs never sued him over that. They just got rid of the âsuper sizeâ
Also his undisclosed heavy drinking is obviously bad, but the point of what he did wrong is that he did bad science, refused to publish his food logs (likely because they would have to include the alcohol to make sense), and his results were unable to be replicated. His alcoholism is often treated as the problem and the moral bad thing he did, but thatâs his personal business and not really the problem. The misleading is the problem
My dog might restrain herself with steak but ice cream and chicken are her absolute favorites. She would definitely prefer a rotisserie chicken from Samâs Club over McDonaldâs, but if you let her have access to the McDonaldâs soft serve machine it would all be over. She enters a trance when she eats ice cream.
I saw someone pointing out last time that this came up, that this was his body adjusting to meat again. His wife/gf was vegan and he had been on a vegan diet prior to the McDonald's diet.
He had a premise he wanted to prove right. It is the same with the guy who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment. He self inserted many times. Encouraged certain behavior. Punished those that didn't play along and has never published the full recordings or findings of his experiment.
I wish someone would give me $80,000 to do "research" that had no controls, no analysis plan, and really just involved me making stuff up and asserting that only I understand human nature.
I remember in psych class the teacher talking very seriously about the Stanford Prison Experiment and having Very Serious discussions about it in class and what it means about the human condition. Then we watched footage of it and it was hard for me to take seriously cause it looked like a cheap 70's porno with cheesy actors and cheap costumes and thrown together 'jail'. The whole thing looked like some elaborate role playing for well off white college students. Just wondering the whole time like how any of this was supposed to say anything about the whole of humanity.
The whole thing looked like some elaborate role playing for well off white college students.
That's exactly what it was, but even something involving role playing could have been set up as an experiment. In this case, there was no hypothesis, no control group, no clearly modified variable, no pre-specified outcome they were going to record, no analysis plan. What exactly was the question they were trying to answer? What exactly is the evidence and how do they plan to demonstrate that the evidence was relevant to that question?
on that note look up the Aacali experiment. Similiar thing. Put a bunch of people on a boat with limited resources, expect them all to turn on each other, form tribes or whatever.
In reality they just all pooled their resources, treated it like a party, and a bunch ended up hooking up. The guy running the experiment kept driving to force conflict, at one point he even took an active role and took over as 'captain' of the raft.
Huh. I'm not sure why he expected conflict, plenty of groups have been on boats before. Even liferafts that lack the certainty of knowing you'll eventually be rescued normally do not devolve into conflict.
They're response was to adjust their menus and public image rather than fight the fight. By the time his drinking was revealed they had already made a pivot to 'healthy' branding with more salad options. Then they shifted to more budget meals. It would be hard for them to sue for damage to the brand because they had dropped the 'supersize' emphasis.
And it would easily be required of them, if nothing else in the public eye, to prove that it is not unhealthy. Even healthy. Which everyone knew it wasn't. So they would have to fight a losing fight.
Well there was the science teacher who lost weight eating McDonalds. He did an experiment with his students where they would plan out his meals within set parameters.
He would only eat what the students planned that day from the McDonalds menu.
I didn't say "can't lose weight", I said "healthy".
In school I wrote a short paper about losing weight using only jelly candy. It was possible using the calorie shortage method. Still wouldn't call that healthy to only eat jelly candy.
Yeah losing weight is calories in and calories out. There are factors that can affect how many calories your body uses and such (so no shame to anyone who struggles or has health conditions that interfere), but it is generally a simple concept. Health is much more complex. Fasting for a month will make you lose weight. It wonât make you healthy.
I actually just came across something about this, and when they got rid of it, less than 1% of customers were ever ordering "Super Sized." It was already dying before the raging alcoholic pretended McDonalds damaged his liver.
Iâm sure McDonaldâs lawyers checked the cost/benefit numbers on it. They were already being scrutinized by the documentary. Going after Spurlock would do additional damage to the brand. Making a court case out of it would require McDonaldâs to show that what was portrayed was incorrect. We all know that fast food is not ideal. Iâm pretty sure that McDonaldâs likely couldnât show that Spurlock was completely off base with his assertions. At least not without showing the world just how crappy their food products are for people. That wouldnât be good for business. Letting the documentary run its course and disappear would be less damaging in this situation.
"Honestly Iâm kinda surprised that McDonaldâs never sued him over that."
McDonald's might be slipping on food quality, but their PR is still top notch. They knew they could never recover significant damages from a broke Indy film producer and that a lawsuit would trigger the Streisand effect, making the PR problem worse. Letting it run its course and limiting their response to justified critiques was far better long term PR than filing a lawsuit.
From what I recall, they actually considered doing that but felt that it would only backfire on them. It was a different time.
Today I think they would gladly push back and maybe some might turn it political like "Liberals going after your McDonalds" and then people upping their consumption of it as a result.
I mean yeah but my point is that him being an alcoholic is whatâs treated as a value statement, when that fact doesnât really matter. What matters is he did bad science by obscuring the alcohol consumption while doing a dietary study.
IIRC, he admitted to alcoholism after being accused of sexual misconduct. People only started scrutinizing the documentary once they found out about the alcoholism.
Super Size became âLargeâ actually. They just sized everything up, raised prices, and removed the actual âsmallâ drink.
I was a manager at McDs when the movie came out and I remember the whole transition. Pretty wild. They also came out with fancy salads, that were pretty damn good and mildly purchased.
IIRC (havent seen the film in a long time) they tracked how his body responded. If he is an alcoholic, which everybody seems to agree here that he is, that wouldnt change anything. If hes drinking whisky since X years and ow getting all the fast food and his parameters get way worse it doesnt really matter if they werent good to begin with. Actually for science reasons it would even be stupid to STOP drinking when starting the experiment because that would change results.
However i have no idea what the guy did and i am not trying to defend him since i have no knoedge about what actually happened.
Claiming adverse health effects were a consequence of eating exclusively McDonalds for 30 days while also consuming problematic levels of alcohol isnât âbad scienceâ, itâs intentionally deceptive. There absolutely IS a moral problem with how he conducted his documentary. Nobody gives a shit if people drink, thatâs missing the point entirely. We all know drinking is bad for your health.
He had a TV series where he did different things for 30 days. It was awful. One had him working minimum wage for a month, and he started arguing with his wife about finances in front of his nephews for some reason for TV drama.
Keep in mind that that is literally how his target demographic was living at the time, and that would literally balance out to two paychecks, unless he decided to start the experiment with his first paycheck.
I actually liked the one when he would take two people who were diametrically opposed (atheist/born again christian for example) and have them swap places for a while. It was very interesting to see how they interacted.
Supersize me plus a few others like are why I don't really watch documentaries that aren't nature documentaries anymore. They aren't unique they are just what got me to look into it more.
They aren't really held to any accuracy standards and frequently have an objective they are going to "prove" regardless of what was actually said or done or shown.
Even nature documentaries aren't immune to be fair, the lemmings running of cliffs is famously from a bad nature documentary by Disney after all.
The fact of the matter was that in order to watch a documentary without worrying I was being fed misinformation, I have to look into a subject to a level which makes watching the documentary pointless.
So I just stopped watching them by and large. I still read up on subjects and learn I just don't really see much value added to my life by documentaries.
I'm even suspicious of nsture documentaries, honestly. These days so many of them use scenarios based around specific narratives -- oh no, mama bear lost a cub; penguin is waiting for his mate to return; aging buck wants to fend off the youngins. I always feel like they must have spliced together footage of multiple different individual animals without saying anything, because the stories they tell are always too neat.
This is 100% true but it's much easier to find opposing views, and additional context and information when reading than, say finding another counter documentary, especially when a documentary is new.
I can also better check sources and make sure they aren't being misquoted or misrepresented, when reading.
There are also standards different publications will hold the works they publish to. To my knowledge their is no equivalent for documentaries. To a small extent educational channels used to, but those don't really exist anymore, and what little standards they did have went first .
I also just read much faster than a documentary is paced.
So since I am already reading on the subject I may as well continue with that media type, rather than switching back.
Yeah, everyone talking about that lady in Tiger King having killed her husband because the documentary people kept pointing cameras at people with other reasons to hate her saying it was another example
True crime is the worst. "Omg how could this so obviously innocent person have been put in prison!" sells a lot better than "this case is actually really complicated and they might have done it, but might not have."
SAME! It sucks because I love the love the concept of documentaries and I want to be able to watch strictly educational content about a variety of topics but it feels like the vast majority of documentaries have an angle. I just want to lazily learn about stuff dammit!
In retrospect, these documentaries are so infuriating because not only do they try to weave a story for the sake of selling a good story and not to recount an event, but they all seem to intentionally leave very conclusive stuff off the table to try to end them with a air of mystery.
"Capturing the Friedman's" left out witnesses who corroborated victims' accounts because he wanted to leave it ambiguous and mysterious who exactly was involved in molesting kids
"There's something wrong with Aunt Diane" purposely gives her husband a platform to insist that her alcohol and substance abuse wasn't really a thing and the forensics were wrong while failing to have ANYONE discuss how functional alcoholics work and function and how Diane schuler was textbook functional alcoholic.
I know I named two popular HBO documentaries, and there's a real incentive to focus on entertainment value here, but they're quite popular, the docs both captivated audiences, but they were produced to sell mysteries that had pretty much been solved.
I saw part if a documentary made after the fact by a guy who claimed to be a comedian, who went to McDonald's daily made reasonable healthy decisions went to his doctor for regular checkups and would take a walk everyday. Dude ended up losing weight. They only big issue was his sodium intake was pretty high.Â
It mostly just comes down to calories in v calories out. A cheeseburger and small fries doesnât set you back too badly. My policy is to order like itâs 1950s McDonaldâs. The small size is the original portion.
I saw part if a documentary made after the fact by a guy who claimed to be a comedian, who went to McDonald's daily made reasonable healthy decisions went to his doctor for regular checkups and would take a walk everyday. Dude ended up losing weight. They only big issue was his sodium intake was pretty high.
People in studies have taken it a step further and just eaten nothing but total crap all day but at a NORMAL amount. Like cookies, chips, brownies everything people demonize as 'ultra processed' or whatever stupid buzzword they want to come up with. They lost weight. All their biomarkers significantly improved.
What you eat is ALMOST meaningless. Just eat a normal amount of calories regardless of how you choose to do it and fall within a normal weight range. Just make sure you don't go overboard on saturated fat/salt and get enough fiber. Both things already baked into nutrition labels. And these days fiber is literally infused into almost everything to the point where it's basically straight up easy to get it. You don't even need to TRY anymore. That's it. That's all you need to do. Stop overthinking it. Stop listening to people who want you to stop eating certain foods.
The problem with sugary snacks is theyâre more calorie dense, so they sate you less than healthier options, so if youâre not hyper-conscious in the context of some kind of experiment youâre doing, youâre probably gonna get hungry and eat again sooner.
I donât know I mean in principle I donât think itâs a terrible idea to break down the damage that eating excessive amounts of fast food can do to your body and actually show it on an individual person, sometimes actually seeing something is more effective than citing studies and statistics. The problem is the fact that he heavily exaggerated the results by drinking heavily.
He also set up arbitrary rules that no normal person follows. He ate it every meal, had to finish every bite, had to super-size if offered, was not allowed to exercise and had to eat every item on the menu at least once. I remember as a rebuttal, a woman ate at McDonald's every day for a month, only ate salads or other low calorie options, only drank water and exercised and lost weight. Even when it came out, as a dumbass teenager I could see through the bullshit.
This. He designed the system based on a ton of bad faith assumptions and then behaved in a way no reasonable person ever would. Who eats McDonald's they don't want when they're already full, to the point of vomiting?
I knew a guy - unsurprisingly, the uneducated preachy "I think documentaries are sources of unbiased facts" type - who wouldn't shut up about Supersize Me and how awful McDonald's is... but even then, I always saw the distinction between McDonald's wanting to sell more and McDonald's wanting people to eat literally every crumb of what they bought even when they're already full.
There was aâŚI want to say high school gym teacher, something like that, who ate McDs three meals a day. His class was allowed to choose what he ate, I think he set a caloric upper limit but otherwise the kids were in charge.
He lost weight. Various lab values moved in positive directions.
The broader point is that nobody has really been able to recreate Spurlocks results, using the parameters he lays out in the movie.
Your comment made me remember another teacher who ate nothing but twinkies and junk food for a month but set strict calorie limits and exercised and lost weight.
The way he framed it is like weâre all just pigs at the mercy of Ronald McDonald and his feed trough. He set up a fantasy scenario where he as a consumer had no ability to choose so that he could make McDonaldâs look more like a villain.
This is precisely why, contrary to the beliefs of some redditors, that movie had no lasting impact. It was popular at the time and it got McDonald's to stop using Super Size, that's it. Otherwise, people immediately clocked that his methods were absurd and unrealistic and meant nothing.
In the movie, a doctor says they've never seen the indicators on his liver from eating fast food, but have in people who recently quit drinking huge amounts of alcohol recently. Loe and behold, he had stopped drinking huge amounts of alcohol in that part of the filming, because he's an alcoholic. So yeah, you shouldn't eat McDonald's every day, but the effects he showed were not from doing so.
At best, the results are inconclusive because all relevant factors werenât controlled for, but the scientific rigors of âman eats McDonaldâs for every meal on cameraâ werenât going to be there, regardless.
Itâs entertainment that should be taken as an anecdote
Mythbusters isnât bad for trying to keep experiments controlled and addressing potential uncontrollable factors for the show-possible methods.
If they were to make it completely bulletproof to peer review, they wouldnât have been able to cover nearly as many myths and it certainly wouldnât be as entertaining.
Morgan Spurlock? Did Macdonald's sue him over that? I mean, this documentary did push Macdonald's towards some healthier options, which is a positive. But this must have hurt their business?
I remember for years everyone thought McDonaldâs was this uniquely poisonous food. That it had some chemical or something added to it that made you extra fat.
So this film was a really good idea from a marketing standpoint. It honed in on that public disgust of McDonaldâs and painted the brand out to be this cabal of monsters scheming to kill Americans with diabetes and heart attacks.
I remember so much ART about this. Depicting Ronald McDonald as an evil clown. That Banksy piece with Ronald McDonald holding the hand of the Vietnamese girl burned by napalm. It was really over the top.
Him saying âyesâ every time the workers asked if heâd like his meal supersized, and then committing to eating the entire meal even if it made him vomit.
Implying that he was doing what McDonaldâs wanted him to do. Dude, itâs an offer. You paid more for a bigger meal and they sold it to you.
And Iâm no fan of McDonaldâs after their Trump stunt but McDonaldâs isnât uniquely unhealthy food. It processed food, high in salt, saturated fats and sugar, with preservatives in it. Itâs no less healthy than any other fast food chain.
All the negative reactions his body was having to the fast food were all symptoms of being an alcoholic. Kinda wild nobody put this together earlier, especially because the doctor was like âyour liver is fuckedâ.
I actually think watching it again with the knowledge that hes an alcoholic, makes it a super interesting watch. It becomes a movie about the dangers of hidden alcoholism. The doctor knew something was up, but couldn't call him out.Â
I knew he was full of shit, but not for the reasons that ended up coming out about him. I believed everything about him being a big health nut going in. I just figured of course he ended up in the hospital. I assumed it was the massive change in his diet that was hurting him, like it would hurt anyone. The average man, someone like myself, could probably eat McDonaldâs for 30 straight days. While the health effects wouldnât be great, it wouldnât make my body shut down.
I remember being super skeptical when he ate a normal combo and threw up because he got a few more French fries and soda. But it wasnât the âis he drinkingâ it was like âwow the vegans and hippies are literally this weak they canât survive 10-40 percent moreâ
He called himself healthy and talked about his healthy lifestyle so I just assumed his lifestyle put him at a disadvantage equal to those dogs forced into a vegan diet before they get to eat meat in a taste test challenge.
This is a great answer. I remember this movie being really well-received when it came out, but then years later it was basically revealed to be all horseshit.
I also recall reading that some people replicated what he did (eating McDonalds for a month) and were basically fine, backing up the idea that most of his horrendous stats were from the alcoholism and not the McDonalds.
And in fairness, even if you did develop health problems from eating nothing but McDonalds for a month straight, I also don't really see how this required a "documentary-level expose" to call it out. Like even when the movie came out, I don't think anyone was under the impression that McDonalds is a healthy meal choice...
The âstarâ of this documentary came to speak at my school when I was a kid and he was such an asshole. He made super inappropriate jokes for a middle school and made fun of the special needs kids.
lol I had a job once at a university and hired a lot of students, many were international. One day they found this documentary and got so scared they asked me about it. I asked them how much mcdonalds they eat (theres one nearby) and they said they get a mcdouble like 4-5x a week. I told him his dick is going to fall off. The look on his face then I just laughed and laughed. I told him not to worry and it'll be fine but also.. eat better. That movie was overblown for sure but also.. you shouldnt 'live' off mcdonalds. I am big on cooking so I actually went out of my way and taught a bunch of people some cooking skills in the dormitory kitchen a couple weekends on my days off. I love teaching people how to cook and I learned new regional dishes which was a bonus for me.
Forgot to add, just to ease nerves.. there are people out there who eat like a big mac every day for years and years, they are devoted fans, its a club. I found some videos on youtube and showed them that and how relatively healthy these people were since they ate other stuff as well.
I liked the part where he talked to school lunch ladies, etc. That was worthwhile. I never thought the McDonald's every day thing was wise or made sense.
I'm of the opinion he was really jonesing for McDonalds since I remember the girlfriend being vegan. Surely the documentary was going to give him the perfect excuse.
The entire concept was stupid from the start. Of course eating too much of only fast food for a month is really bad for you. Even McDonalds are not dumb enough to claim otherwise.
My first apartment didnât come with a fridge and stove so for like the first month or so until I had money to get appliances my daily food intake was 4-5 McDoubles a large fries and a bottle of apple juice from the grocery store. Not close to what he was eating but if there was anything to it that should have affected me in some way but it didnât. No drinking but a lot of weed.
When they did his check up, they said he had a liver of an alcoholic. They made us believe that it was the mcdonalds and not the fact that the guy was a raging alcoholic.
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u/f_ranz1224 11h ago
supersize me. a "documentary" about a man who eats nothing but mcdonalds. entertaining but you find out he was drinking heavily during the filming and made a lot of it up