The Inside Skinny From The Director Of "Supersize Me"

[hatrack]

"First-time filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me is a lean, zippy documentary about growing bloated and lethargic. A record of his decision to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at McDonald's for 30 days straight (and to eat nothing else), Spurlock's film starts out in a light, humorous vein but turns increasingly somber as it becomes apparent that the man onscreen is poisoning himself to make a point. An obvious point, perhaps, but one worth making nonetheless. It's one thing to know intellectually that fast food is bad for you, but it's still alarming to see it demonstrated by a human guinea pig. In the month he spent eating off the McDonald's menu, Spurlock put on 25 pounds, raised his body fat from 11 to 18 percent, and saw his cholesterol shoot up from 160 to 230. After three weeks, the physicians monitoring him said he risked serious liver damage and urged him to quit.

Spurlock, who attended USC but didn't get into the film school, does more than document his own ballooning waistline. Traveling around the country, he draws up a devastating, though never preachy, indictment of a society that has made the sale of bad food to the masses a pillar of its national and international economic strategy. In certain parts of the country, where there is almost nothing but fast-food restaurants to choose from, junk food isn't just a way of life, it's virtually a destiny.

EDIT

It seemed to me that you not only looked fatter and less healthy as the film went on, you also looked less intelligent. The light seemed to go out of your eyes.

Over the course of the film I found myself getting dumber. I would forget things that were just told to me, I was completely scatterbrained, I couldn't pay attention – my cognitive skills were just vanishing.

In terms of the effect on your health, the most notable thing was what happened to your liver.

My liver basically just got filled with fat. As your liver gets sick, it releases more enzymes into your blood, and my liver was getting really sick by the end. So much so that I was en route to getting cirrhosis – just from eating a high-fat diet. Too many people live in the moment, without realizing that what they put in their mouth now is going to affect them five years from now. What I'm hoping this film makes people think about is the longer-term effect of what you do today."

EDIT

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18583

[donsu]

1. a lot of fast food is microwaved which causes

some good cholesterol to change into bad cholesterol

[TO Kid]

2. Anyone stupid enough to eat nothing but McDs...

As my grandmother used to say, too much of anything can kill you.