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Food For Thought

Super Size Me is a Micheal Moore type documentary about the health hazards of eating fast food on a regular basis. Concerned about the fact that America has become the fattest nation in the world, Morgan Spurlock looks at the hypothesis that part of this tendency is due to the exaggerated amounts of fast food that people are eating combined with their lack of physical exercise. This hypothesis has been the subject of a high-profile trial where two teenage girls sued McDonalds for causing their health problems. The trial was considered valid, but ultimately dismissed as the attorneys failed to prove that McDonalds willfully produced harm to the girls. Did Morgan Spurlock prove the hyphothesis and show unbaised evidence that the girls did not have control over their health problems? Spurlock used biased and exaggerated information in order to sell his theory. Super Size Me is a film that portrays biased and exaggerated information yet raises an alarm for our country to eat healthier.

The truth is not very complicated, although some aspects are not as obvious to everyone. Fast food is dangerous. Even the McDonalds salads have a ridiculously high calorie and sugar content. The sizes of all portions have quadrupled and more since the original fast foods were created. Customers are encouraged to go for the "super size" meal deals and a lot fall for the lure of saving a few cents and doubling the amount of food they get. Customers are subjected to intense advertising and particularly children are a main target of McDonalds campaigns: happy meals, birthday parties, children playgrounds all these make it almost impossible for a parent to deny their kids a McDonalds meal once they had their first one; and once childhood pleasant memories become associated with McDonald', the pleasure of eating there persists as a teenager and even adult. Morgan's solution to that was to "punch my kid in the face each time we pass in front of a McDonalds, this way...

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