Cynically those changes were just a rebrand to meet changing mores about health. McDonald's salad famously has more calories than the big mac. Super size items may not be called super sized, but an extra-large is the same size a super sized item. The obesity epidemic rages on and has continued to worsen in the US and has spread to pretty much every developed country. Not that I fault Spurlock for any of that, just a disappointing outcome to say the least.
> McDonald's salad famously has more calories than the big mac.
Almost all salads have high calories when you account for the large amount of dressing most people use. But you can control how much dressing you use, and they also have a lot more fiber than a Big Mac.
> an extra-large is the same size a super sized item
One of the points of the movie was that he would always have to say yes when asked if he wanted to super size. THAT is a big difference between just ordering a larger size. After someone already decided on the size they wanted, the clerk would then ask that question. Most people are conditioned to be polite, and many no doubt said yes simply to avoid being seen as disagreeable. This movie caused McDonald’s to stop doing this.
Can you? If people could control what they eat, we wouldn't have the obesity problem in the first place. I would argue it's harder to control how much you consume something (let's say alcohol) than not consuming it at all, so relying people to dose their dressings based in calories is a losing proposition.
Also I think people go for the bigger size not because they're asked but because it's priced a stupidly small amount higher so people go "wow, why buy a small dose of poison for $2, when I can buy a gigantic amount of poison for $2.10? I get way more poison for my money with the second option!". TBH, I'm pretty pissed at pizzerias for trying to get me twice as much pizza as I need by making 2 pizzas literally the same price as one. Just sell me one pizza (which is by itself my whole day's worth of calories already) a person can eat for a reasonable price. Please.
We metaphorically cut one head off the hydra when the root cause is various government subsidies (or lack thereof for healthier foods). And then as you say, thst head grew back disguised as new buzzwords.
Stuff is a bit better for gen alpha in school, but there's still a lot of work to do.
No the root cause is that Americans continue to be indifferent to eating crap. As long as it is sweet or salty, packs a ton of calories and has some semblance of food in it, theres money to be made from it. It doesn't help that how much money can be made is one of the main yardsticks of worthiness in this culture often superceding common sense.
Sure, the root root cause is Apathy, like many other factors. But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country. Americans maybe have more food coming in (or grown domestically), but I'd be surprised if the gap (if any) was that large.
So I think finding the root cause one level up is still worthwhile.
> It doesn't help that how much money can be made is one of the main yardsticks of worthiness in this culture often superceding common sense.
This portion is interesting, but contradictory to the statistics. It's actually lower class citizens who have higher obesity rates in America. A poignant factor that suggests that the costs of certain foods may be something to investigate (I'm sure it's already well investigated. I just haven't looked it up in years).
>But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country
You haven't spent a lot of time in other 'first-world' countries. A lot of what passes for food here in America would be regarded with outright horror in most of Europe. Their food regulatory agencies simply have a much stricter standard for what can be placed on shelves. Here in America it seems like it takes just a couple dubious studies often funded by the food manufacturers to get something labelled food grade. Pick up say a chicken pot pie next time you go to the grocery store and take a look at the ingredients list and if next you have the opportunity to go to somewhere in Europe do the same. Another big difference is that the (vast) majority of Americans must have food be sweet otherwise it is unpalatable. This is why virtually everything has sugar in it. Many Europeans I know are simply shocked at how hard it is to find bread, of all things that doesn't have sugar in it. If you compare the menu from the same fast food brands like say KFC in say Tokyo and NewYork, the Tokyo version is going to be less salty, less sweet and will have fewer artificial ingredients because the average Japanese eater doesn't put sweetness above everything else and probably has a different idea of 'tastiness'
As for your claim that obesity is more of a lower class thing, I'm not sure what America you're living in. Obesity in the US knows no class, even if the rates are slightly higher for the working class it is still a problem across all social classes. And I'm not sure what that has to do with the point that people who sell crap or do crappy things are not judged by what they sell but how much they make, which is a bug or feature of capitalism in general but especially American capitalism.
In Canada and other places, we just don't have most of those sizes; supersize was replaced with nothing afaik. Fast food places do still try and trick you into thinking a massive soda with your burger is somehow worth the combo price.
In general, yeah, our portions are too large and we don't eat healthily enough!
but an extra-large is the same size a super sized item
I don't think McDonalds has "extra-large" anything? The sizes for drinks and fries in their app are S/M/L. It is also perhaps worth noting that both of those items default to "M" for me.
