The Oscar-nominated 2004 film Supersize Me follows the health and weight of a man who decides to eat nothing but McDonalds for an entire month to demonstrate the dangers of fast food. This documentary has seen global success, making over twenty two million in the box office and is still played in classrooms nationwide.
Twenty years after its release, however, this documentary raises several questions: is it okay to make character judgments about a person because of the shape of their body? To what extent were the results of this experiment actually legitimate? Aren’t there factors beyond fast food that cause Americans to struggle with health? And, beyond the scope of the documentary’s content, is it okay to show a documentary starring confirmed sex offenders?
While I believe the documentary yielded some legitimate educational value, it is my contention that this film needs to be removed and replaced.
As a pop-science documentary from 2004, Supersize Me begins exactly how you’d expect: by declaring the United States to be the “fattest” nation in the world. Then is presented our director and star, Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock was then a thirty three year old man from Manhattan. Growing up, his mother always cooked for him, and at the time of the film he was in a long-term relationship with a vegan chef. Before he started on his McDonalds binge, Spurlock had a physical and all results were astoundingly healthy. What is not disclosed about Spurlock’s health in the documentary or to the doctors is that he was an alcoholic and had been since he was thirteen years old.
Throughout the documentary, larger people’s bodies were filmed while they were walking down the street, ostensibly without their permission given their blurred-out faces. Spurlock walks around Manhattan interviewing people of different body sizes and asking about their lifestyles and fast food habits, offering this handpicked sample as evidence. As evidence of what? This is never answered directly, however one stark message is stated very explicitly.
Jacob Sullum, managing editor of Reason, a libertarian monthly magazine (not a health magazine), describes a meal where someone at the table admitted to being a smoker and someone else at the table said it was bad for him. The smoker agreed. The magazine editor goes on to say:
“At that same table there was a quite large woman, and I was wondering what if this guy, instead of confronting the smoker, had said to the large woman “what’s the matter with you, you fat pig? Don’t you know how dangerous it is to be overweight? Stop eating for God’s sake and don’t you dare get dessert.” Right? Same logic…”
To accost someone about their physical appearance, dehumanize them by calling them a “pig” and to tell someone to stop eating is inexplicably harmful. You can walk around without a cigarette between your fingers, but you cannot walk around without your own body. Two ways people try to get out of their own body when they feel unsafe in it are disordered eating and suicide, which is what this kind of hostile language promotes. This statement has nothing to do with health; and because this is an opinion article, I am of the opinion that other people’s health is not my business.
Although this documentary was meant to illustrate the perils of fast food, Spurlock decides to make lifestyle changes to simulate a regular fast food eater’s lifestyle. For instance, he takes a cab to work instead of walking as usual. The most obese states in the country are in the South and Midwest, which do not share the same luxury of public transportation that New Yorkers enjoy. In these places, most people have no choice but to drive to and from work. Many of these states are also poor. As a treat, not everyone can afford a nice meal at a restaurant, and not everyone has the energy to cook for their families after a long day at work. That’s when fast food is the most accessible option.
There is also the factor of race to keep in mind. Due to structural racism, certain low-income and usually non-white neighborhoods in the United States are “food deserts,” or places where access to nutritional food is extremely limited. People are being malnourished by their own country, and of course the Manhattan boyfriend of a vegan chef couldn’t understand that.
Returning to the experiment, Spurlock is in the middle of his binge. He goes to the general physician who tells him that his liver is fatty and his liver enzymes are irregular in a way that he has only seen with long-term alcohol abuse. This was one of the selling points of the film when it was released, and it wouldn’t be until 2017 in a letter to the public that he would admit to his alcoholism.
It should also be noted that universities such as Linköping University in Sweden replicated the ‘Supersize Me’ experiment and never got similar results in regards to liver function.
In the same letter that Spurlock revealed his alcoholism, he also admitted to sexual misconduct including rape, workplace harrassment and serial infidelity. The letter was posted on Dec. 14, 2017 to his TwitLonger (a site that allowed people to use twitter without a character limit), and a New York Times article was released about it that same day. Another public figure shown in Supersize Me, Jared Fogel or “Jared from Subway”, would be convicted of child sex tourism as well as possession of child pornography in 2015.
While the validity and ethics of the documentary itself have already been examined, these revelations demand that we ask other ethical questions: should we give bad people our attention? Should we give them our money in the case that they own the rights to media like this? Personally, I wouldn’t feel right about it.
If you are a professor considering how to teach your students about the risks of fast food diets, I hope you will stick to the research and not give these people or their prejudices any more screen time.
