Super Size Me

Super Size Me is a very interesting film. It seems I watched an awful lot of documentaries recently, and Super Size Me is one that investigates the effects of continual eating of junk food. Morgan Spurlock attempts to eat McDonald’s food for every meal of every day over a 30-day period. The movie documents the effects this has on his body and mental state.

The film is set against the backdrop of an increasingly overweight society. This is a relatively uncontroversial issue. There is no denying that overweight and obesity is a growing problem in many countries, and yet many people continue to eat junk food. Spurlock introduces the case of two obese teenagers who sued McDonalds, blaming their food for their obesity. The case was thrown out of court however, as it was argued there was no proof that the food had been solely responsible for their unhealthy outcomes and that people should be aware of the risks.

Morgan Spurlock presents some interesting cases and features during his journey through this mission. These are all quite controversial, and all are very thought provoking. There is one feature in which he visits a school and shows children various pictures, asking them to identify who is in the picture. Now obviously some of the results will have been edited to give them more of an impact, but children being unable to identify a picture of Jesus Christ, one even mistaking him for George Bush, but being easily able to identify Ronald McDonald is a problem.

Spurlock’s documentary is obvious an extreme example of how junk food can impact on your health. Eating McDonalds for three meals a day by anyone’s standards is too far, but this documentary shows the serious effects that even an unhealthy diet can have. The physical effects that the ‘McDiet’ has on Spurlock’s body are quite worrying. His health deteriorates quite significantly in a month and he gains a lot of weight and loses a lot of muscle. Most seriously though is the addictive attributes that he displays. He becomes depressed, lethargic and experiences headaches, and it is the consumption of McDonalds that relieves these effects. While it is an extreme experiment, it is not one that shows slight effects. It has a genuine impact on the audience. I was shocked at some of the effects on Spurlock’s body and mind and thought that the message of the film was massively applicable to society today.

The only problem with Super Size Me is that the major message of the film is lost behind the air of comedy behind the film. I'm not saying that it's laugh out loud funny, but there are some amusing moments in the film and this clouds the seriousness of the effects of the McDiet on Spurlock. The best example of this is when he is sick after eating his first supersized meal, but throughout the film there are slightly sinister, but slightly amusing images of Ronald McDonald from various protestor groups. Another problem is that he takes the ‘experiment’ to an extreme. Instead of living his normal life and eating a lot of McDonalds, he goes from presumably quite an active life to a very inactive life combined with intense food intake. Many critics consider Super Size Me to be a distortion of basic scientific methods which singles out McDonalds and doesn't actually tell the audience anything. This is true to a certain extent: I mean it is obvious that eating McDonalds every day for a month is bad for your health. He also has refused to publish his food log, which has raised a number of issues in terms of the critics acceptance of his documentary. That people will find problems is an inevitable outcome of any documentary.

I really enjoyed Super Size Me though. Although it had the slight effect of making me quite peckish, it has impacted on my perceptions of junk food. This will probably be quite temporary though. It might be the relevance of this film to my degree which drew me to it, but either way, I think that watching it can only have a positive effect on you. It makes you much more aware of the dangers of not watching what you are eating. However, the singling out of McDonalds is quite bad. I’d imagine the owners of Burger King loved this film. Burger King (and Wendy’s etc) are mentioned, but the film definitely focuses on the one establishment. One has to be in a certain mood for a documentary, and Super Size Me is a good choice when that mood hits. Unlike most of Michael Moore’s productions it is relatively uncontroversial, and is much more enjoyable because it is more light-hearted.