In the US, there’s a concern that some alcohol company will start claiming their drinks are healthier than the others, so alcohol packaging isn’t required to say anything about the number of calories in the drink ( https://www.eatingwell.com/article/2052030/why-your-booze-do... ).
It makes me wonder how many people see that calories aren’t listed and assume “it must be small.” I don’t think anybody believes alcohol is a diet drink, but I’m sure many people don’t realize how it’s packed with calories.
I think they should treat it like in the UK and use a different measurement like “1 standard drink”, and, probably more importantly, forbid it from being used in marketing. I think if the minimum was 1, and even if a beer has low calories it still counts as 1 drink, it would avoid this issue.
Also note that during the experiment one of Spurlock’s medical professionals comments on his diet as averaging 5000 kcal/day given his food logs. At another point a different professional states that these results seem impossible without heavy drinking of alcohol, implying that he wasn't disclosing the alcohol in his food logs to them either.
"diet" soda is still a huge chasm of psychological confusion so I wouldn't call it the silver bullet to beating the calories in metric. If only life were so simple.
But yes, that was part of the point of the documentary. Super size portions were triple that of small and instead of a quarter pounder we're talking double or triple the meat (and maybe more grease in the burger to boot). And companies encouraged consumer to supersize because higher profit margins.
> There’s no hoax - he actually ate McDonald’s 3x a day. Where’s the false and preposterous claim we’re supposedly being tricked in to believing?
That the observed health impacts—the liver like one of a heavy drinker, particularly—were a consequence of the fast food and not, you know, being a heavy drinker.
These are very different claims:
(1) Eating fast food exclusively gives you the liver of a heavy drinker, or
(2) Heavy drinking plus eating fast food exclusively gives you the liver of a heavy drinker.
The second is also far less surprising than the first, and says a lot less about fast food.
You know, it's funny, because his specific example was definitely caused by the alcoholism and not the excess calories.
Buuuuut, America is currently experiencing a significant increase in the amount of Fatty Liver Disease for non-alcoholics.
Being slightly overweight for a long time DOES give you the liver of a budding alcoholic. It's not serious and can be reversed....... IF you lose weight, you know, that thing that people are so bad at doing, they got a fatty liver in the first place. So this is going to suck for a while.
So Super Size Me is somewhat well-done; the vast majority of the info is talking with experts like a normal documentary, the “experiment” is mostly just communicated as a framing device for unrelated discussion. (This is not 100% true because one convo with an expert is with his sexual partner, describing how the “saturated fats have gotten to his penis” and how she “always has to be on top now” due to his diet.)
However I do think it's clear in how it's framed that we're meant to categorize his McDonald's experience as informative, holding out that this experiment has some connection to the consequences we might experience from eating McDonald’s, and the problem is that he doesn't conduct the experiment in a realistic way. He was to be frank intentionally trying to generate the biggest possible weight gain in 30 days that he could. If you look carefully when he lays out his food in front of you, you'll see both a full-calorie soda AND a shake or ice cream at each meal, in addition to the super-size fries and the sandwich. The folks in the movie who saw his food log say he was consuming 5000 kcal/day, which I think is being sold as “oh my gosh I had no idea it was this easy to overeat at McDonald's.” That sentiment is not correct given the context—qnd the numbers are likely an underestimate because like folks have said, he took it seriously that he was meant to only “eat McDonald's” but gave himself latitude to drink non-McDonalds.
>one convo with an expert is with his sexual partner, describing how the “saturated fats have gotten to his penis” and how she “always has to be on top now” due to his diet.
Huh. The teacher either fast forwarded through that "interview", or the school version was strategically condensed.
Alas, if only it was that easy. Forget fast food, McDonald's would be a trillion dollar industry for men everywhere.
>If you look carefully when he lays out his food in front of you, you'll see both a full-calorie soda AND a shake or ice cream at each meal, in addition to the super-size fries and the sandwich.
That may sound unrealistic, but that's not outside the realm of how some people eat. Maybe not all each meal, but throughout a day of eating. 5000 can make sense for a month to attempt to "prototype" the difference, because 3000 a day for years will show the results are much worse than any short experiment.
There’s no hoax - he actually ate McDonald’s 3x a day. Where’s the false and preposterous claim we’re supposedly being tricked in to believing?