Q: What inspired you to make a film challenging Super Size Me?
...I thought Super Size Me was very well done and very amusing, but at the same time a couple of things about it really bugged me. One was the overall premise, that it’s McDonald’s fault people are getting fatter. That’s ridiculous. Ronald McDonald can’t force you to eat anything, and most people eat at McDonald’s once in awhile, not everyday.
But what really bugged me was when I realized Spurlock’s math didn’t add up. I spent a good part of my adult life as a serial dieter, so I have a pretty good idea what the calorie counts are at McDonald’s. When Spurlock’s nutritionist told him he was consuming 5000 calories per day, alarm bells went off in my head. There’s no way you can consume that many calories at McDonald’s if you’re following his supposed rules.
Q: So in your opinion, Super Size Me is essentially dishonest.
A: Yes, it’s dishonest. Long before I saw it, I heard people talk about how Super Size Me shows what would happen if you just ate three meals per day at McDonald’s. But that’s not what it shows. It shows what would happen if you decided to stuff yourself like crazy so you could gain weight and make a movie about it. You could stuff yourself at a vegan restaurant and gain just as much weight, if that was your goal.
Q: You did exactly the opposite: you ate nothing but fast food for a month and lost weight. How did you manage that?
A: I did it by intentionally ignoring the standard-issue nutrition advice. My doctor of course warned me that if I was going to live on fast food, I should eat as many salads and grilled chicken breasts as I could so I wouldn’t consume too much fat. But I knew better. I ate a lot of fat, because fat is what keeps you feeling full and satisfied. But I did limit my carbohydrates to about 100 per day, because that’s the real key to losing weight, at least for me.
7 Comments:
Oh, the dangers of the official government line on any "scientific" subject. I've been seeing dissent from the official low-fat nutritional guidelines for literally decades.
However, those recommendations are now part of the standard curriculum taught in medical schools, so unfortunately they're not going away anytime soon.
One of the hospitals whose reports I transcribe is a teaching hospital, and the cardiac patients are always put on statins and told to go on a low-fat "heart-healthy" diet.
Yikes.
Good old McD's used to cook their fries in tallow until the Center for Science in the Public Interest and others shamed them into using hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Tallow is one of the most stable fats you can use for frying. I'd eat fries cooked in tallow every now and then, but you'd have to put a gun to my head to get me to eat trans fat fries.
OK but let's be honest. McDonald's is the epitome of American crap food. Just because you can pick out foods there that won't cause you to gain weight doesn't mean the place isn't a blight on American health.
Well, I'm sure I'd disagree with McNaughton on a few things, including the supposed lack of an obesity epidemic.
Of course, McD's isn't health food. But then 95% of what is in the grocery store isn't good for people, either. I think McD's is pretty much middling when it comes to fast food restaurants. They're not as good as Wendy's where you have a salad bar of relatively unadulterated materials. But when you think about what is bad at McD's, it's mostly the sugars, breads, and vegetable oils (in the fries and the salad dressings). In fact I suspect McD's might be better than many fast food outlets. There's some stuff on their chicken in the salads, probably contains MSG and other sorts of weirdness, but you could get a salad without meat and forego the dressing. Or you could get a bag of half an apple at a ridiculous price. :)
I haven't done the math on the nutrition, but I'd much rather piece a meal together at McD's than order a single thing off the KFC menu. And let's face it -- eating there now and then, or even for an entire month if you had to, isn't going to kill you.
Monica(Or anybody else) I'm reading the book the Omnivores Dillemma in class and we have weekly journals we have to write, here is one of the topics...
"we could be using some of the corn we produce to feed other parts of the world rather than turning it into cheap snack and fast foods. Do you think the author has a valid point?"
My answer to this would be "by what right could a person decide for another person what to do with his or her capital...Of course if someone wants to feed other countries with their product it is fine, but they shouldn't be forced by an outsider in no way."
Unfortunately, the journals have to be much longer than that and there aren't that many sites out there that support my belief(I believe in Universal Freedom) when dealing with agriculture, and I know next to nothing about agriculture. So I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction on where I could get some supporting facts and/or articles so I could defend my position better.
Also what would you advise me to do in this class? Should I just regurgitate what the "extremely leftist" teacher tells us when I write papers and journals? I want to defend and spread the ideas of freedom(Freedom to be able to keep what you produce), but I don't know how, it's very frustrating.
Where to start, Joshua?
There are a couple of issues here. First, from a political perspective, people, no matter where they live, should have some self-determination to eat what they like. Even that freedom to eat what we want is diminishing in the US with an incredible amount of nanny statism from the USDA and FDA. (I've read Pollan's writing before, and he's woefully ignorant in thinking that government can actually solve most of our food supply problems. The government caused so many of these problems!) And you are correct that it's not the job of any developed country or person in a developed country to feed the world, and that such charitable programs should be dealt with privately. They have been good and necessary at various historical points, e.g. the tsunami.
I'm not against free trade so long as it's actually FREE. That means that money shouldn't be stolen from taxpayers for such programs. And second, it means US companies shouldn't be able to work with local foreign governments to restrict access of foreigners to seeds those farmers have been planting for millenia, and various reports indicate that that is what is going on. That's not right. Foreign farmers may be irrational or rational to reject the type of farming technology and hybrids that we have, but it's their right. It's also their right to plant them if they want without government restrictions. Unfortunately what we see today is either one or the other -- nationwide bans or, in the case of India, force from a local government/industry juggernaut.
The second issue, which is more practical, is that the type of dent corn the US grows is not particularly suitable for foodstuffs, anyway. What exactly does your professor propose to make out of this corn to feed the third world? Tortillas? It seems hopelessly naive, particularly in light of the cultural mores of various peoples. Many of them don't want western foods, even if they are starving (this happened with US corn when the Irish potato famine hit in the mid 1800s -- the Irish were starving, but they rejected it). Here is the US, even WE don't eat most of it!! Most of it in the US (55%) is fed to livestock. Around 30% is turned to ethanol. The remainder, a very small fraction, is turned into high fructose corn syrup and corn oil -- hardly what one could call healthy foods. And subsidies have made this type of corn artificially profitable. We never would have had so much corn without the subsidies in the first place. Without subsidies, the midwest would basically be farms with pasture animals grazing on rotations of wheat, corn, barley, oats, etc. That's the type of agricultural system that Pollan wants to return to, but is hoping the government can turn it around. The government is the reason we no longer have it.
The third issue is nutritional. Foreign countries need regional and local food systems, from a nutritional perspective. And so do we. Even the golden rice purported to help vitamin A deficiency seems sketchy to me. In the context of a poor diet, I'm skeptical that third world children would have the necessary cellular machinery to convert beta carotene to vitamin A from the golden rice. To really solve the vitamin A problem, they need some local, pastured animal- based agriculture. The idea that the US should "feed the world with grains" and that "organic means starvation" are both ideas that come straight from the Earl Butz years (does Pollan point this out in his book? He should.) Our food system is very centralized and quite socialized. And it's been a miserable failure from a nutritional standpoint for the United States, with record rates of diabetes and type II diabetes (check Good Calories Bad Calories, which strongly links these issues to the foods we now grow). Here are more good sources for nutritional problems with corn products, at least in the context of how they are currently produced: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search?q=corn
I believe I've read the corn chapter in Pollan's book, and I don't believe I remember him mentioning that traditional cultures that grew corn fermented it to rid it of the toxins.
I don't know why on earth anyone would want to force this type of agricultural product on the third world. And indeed, doing so already fosters a great deal of resentment from them.
There are also a number of factors to determine. Even if this were a worthy goal (which I don't agree with at all from a political perspective) and we were to divert all corn to the third world through some sort of centralized government program, we would then have to create a lot of new pasture land here in the US to cover the beef that would not be fed with corn, roughly another 13 million acres (check one of my previous posts on this). That's not something I trust a government to try to figure out.
Frankly, I do think you need to state your opinions in your paper -- whatever they are -- politely. I've disagreed with teachers strongly in the past, and so long as my reasoning was good, I didn't have too many problems. (Once I was asked to write a paper on affirmative action in my Christian college and I made the case against it but it wasn't received well by my professor. However, I got a B-, which was still decent.)
Obviously if you feel your grade is very much in jeopardy I would just toe the line for the higher value of your grade. I guess you have to decide what means more to you -- the grade or intellectual honesty. There are any number of holes with the idea of trying to feed other countries with corn. Honestly.
Oh, and I meant record rates of *obesity* and Type II diabetes. :)
Thank you so much Monica!!! Wonderful post!!!
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