There are, or at least at the time there were a lot of people whose meals come entirely from fast food. There wasnt a lot of awareness about how bad that could be and there had been a decades long trend towards replacing meals with microwave dinners and fast food. Supersize Me did play a part in reversing that trend. It was trying to make a very valid point about fast food and dining habits. So its science wasnt exact, but complaining about that is like quibbling with a Michael Moore documentary for being a little loose with facts
I disagree that there wasn't enough awareness. As someone who was alive at the time, there was a pre-existing moral panic about fast food and there were constant discussions before Supersize Me about how unhealthy it was, not to mention pop culture jokes making fun of it. I think that pre-existing anxiety was one of the reasons so many people saw the film.
I was definitely alive at the time and remember no such moral panic. I remember how much more acceptable it was in the 80's and 90's, even in upper middle class families to have 'tv dinners' and I think even for a time in the 70's and earlier (though I wasn't alive) dining out on fast food was a fashionable novelty. I very strongly remember when there was a discernible cultural shift which saw the likes of Whole Foods going mainstream and then the shift after that when even regular grocery stores started to have organic food and in-store bakeries which they didn't have before. And fast food chains started to consciously introduce salads and drop trans-fats and make other changes to seem more healthy. The shift started before Super-size me but I remember how shocking it was and how it helped to define the new zeitgeist that books like Erich Schlosser's Fast Food Nation were also helping to create. I think Super-Size me was even directly responsible for the fast food chains changing their menu part.
Are you referring to 2004 when the movie came out? Just curious what "at the time" means. My personal recollection, the early 2000s was part of a pushback and the movie was part it.
As a trend from the late 80s to 90s, fast food was on the upswing I'd say. Think back to the 1940s when most American's were not getting enough calories, the average American at the time was not getting enough calories. Fast forward to past the 60s when teenage car culture is all the rage, fast food is part of that picture. If there was effectively no fast food before 1950, and by 2000's it was culturally waning, it raises the question of when was peak fast food? Both in terms of cultural "coolness/acceptanced" and per-capita consumption. I don't know if the per-capita consumpion has gone down, but in terms of culture, I'd guess that happened in the early to mid 90s. Probably co-incided with America being mostly under-nourished, to now "over-nourished" (nourished in quotes as there, as soda calories etc are not really nourishment)
