Stupor Sized

By Patricia Dailey, Editor-in-Chief -- Restaurants & Institutions, 2/15/2004

Five thousand calories a day is a lot by any measure—so much, in fact, that as a daily quota, the number exists in the realm of the ludicrous. Save for a few excessively active or unnaturally hungry people, no one routinely eats that much in the course of an average day. It’s the rough equivalent of three angel-food cakes or two blueberry pies; 11/4 quarts of Thousand Island dressing or 300 fresh apricots; 1,000 stalks of celery or 30 cups of bean-and-bacon soup. It’s 41/2 gallons of light beer, 1,000 asparagus spears or 25 toaster pastries.

In other words, 5,000 calories is too much, the type of wretched excess that is enough to make the average person sick.

That’s pretty much what happens to filmmaker Morgan Spurlock when, for cinematic purposes, he embarks on a big McBinge. “Super Size Me,” his documentary based on those dining experiences, premiered as a hot ticket at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January.

Not having seen the film—which is scheduled for release later this year—it is impossible to imagine what fills all the frames, but this much is known: For 30 straight days, Spurlock indulged in what he describes as “every 8-year-old’s dream.” All his food came from McDonald’s—three squares a day for a total of 90 meals from the land of the Golden Arches, as he sailed through every item on the menu and Super Sized orders when a package deal was available.

Urp.

It was all that and more as viewers learn that Spurlock’s gluttonous ways also caused him to smile pretty and ralph for the camera. He gained 24 pounds and saw his total cholesterol count increase 65 points and blood-fat levels lurch upward. By the telling of one doctor, his liver turned to pâté, and Spurlock says that he believes he was held in the clutches of a food addiction.

All of that should be filed under “too much information” rather than cinema vérité.

Working off of several premises—that each day, one in four Americans has a fast-food meal and that 60% of Americans are said to be either overweight or obese (which makes a connection between the two weak at best if nearly two-thirds of Americans are overweight but only one-quarter are chowing fast food on any given day)—Spurlock’s intent is for “Super Size Me” to raise important questions in viewers’ minds about what they eat.

That is a valid and welcome goal in a nation where the dynamics of food choice, intake, exercise, weight management and health are not even remotely clear to many. Yet even though exaggeration is a common plot device, also welcome would have been an acknowledgement that 5,000 daily calories of anything—even vegan diet fare—would have packed the same 24 pounds on Spurlock and likely caused him to feel every bit as awful. Thirty-five hundred calories of excess intake results in a gained pound, regardless if it comes from asparagus spears or Big Macs.

Solid, balanced, scientific facts are what Americans need to chew on, not sensational fare that threatens to create further confusion and misinformation about their daily bread.