Essays

musings on the movie "supersize me" or

ronald mcdonald is not a pusher

Let me start this out by telling you about me and my family. I am 5'6, 25 years old, and weigh 425 pounds. My husband is 5'5, 26 years old, and weighs 165 pounds. My mother and father, both in their late forties, weigh no less than 225 pounds. My brother and his girlfriend, both younger than me, weigh over 225 pounds. All of them are 5'7 or taller. Other than myself, none of them have any medical issues to explain their weight. We all eat fast food, around 4-5 times a week. Now that we have that established, let us move on.

So, I watched the movie "Supersize Me" a couple nights ago. For those of you who aren't familiar with this film, it is a documentary following a man who ate nothing but McDonald's for 30 days -- breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all super-sized. The point was to show the damage that this kind of food can do to one's body and how unhealthy it is for us. What follows in this entry is some of the notes of running commentary that my husband and I made while we watched. As a result, it's a bit 'stream of consciousness', so bear with me.

The first thing that got me was the way the blame was shifted wholly onto the fast food industry because the rise in obesity coincided with the rise of the fast food restaurant. The statement made is something like "The family restaurant has been around for 100 years; people have been cooking in their homes for 100 years; but the fast food restaurant has only been around a short while, and that's when the problem started."

What is glossed over or ignored is that "fast food" isn't limited to the franchise chains. It's just that when it's in the grocery store, it's called "convenience foods". These are the microwave pizzas, the "meal-in-a-box", the TV dinners, and the vast array of "quick grab" chips, cookies, sodas, and other snacks. While people have cooked in their homes for hundreds of years, the food options have changed drastically in that time. When the only option was fresh meats, fresh vegetables, and breads prepared in the home, obesity was much less of an issue. Now, though, the choices are so much broader, with pre-prepared meals that are shelf-stable. The process of making these foods shelf-stable, though, are not exactly healthy: extra fats and sugars, and all manner of impossible to pronounce preservatives and artificial additives. So, it's not accurate to say that fast food restaurants are solely responsible for the increasing trend toward obesity in this country.

Another contributing factor is the decline of exercise. As the concept of "neighborhood" has been destroyed, and people are living farther and farther away from the commercial zones, walking and riding bikes/horses have become supplanted by cars as the primary means of transportation. So, the food is getting less healthy, and we're doing less work to actually procure and prepare that food. But, according to this film, that's not even part of the problem.

The film then makes (in my opinion) the most damaging statement of all: that obesity is ONLY caused by overeating and nothing else. He lists a number of health conditions that correlate positively with obesity -- among them are three that I have: hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, and polycystic ovarian syndrome. The fallacy here is that correlation does not equal causation. If A has a positive correlation with B, then one of three things is happening: 1) A causes B, 2) B causes A, or 3) some factor C is causing them both.

In my case, those three conditions existed in me before I started gaining weight. I was of a fairly normal weight until puberty, and then I started gaining uncontrollably. It wasn't due to a change in my eating habits, but rather these medical factors ganging up and causing the obesity. In fact, I became anorexic due to the ridicule over my weight. If my obesity was due to overeating and was causing all of these problems, then they should have gone away when I lost weight. But they didn't, and neither did I lose weight at a rate consistent with anorexia. And as soon as I went into recovery for the anorexia, eating a regulated amount of food, I began to plump up again.

Saying that obesity is only caused by overeating is to ignore volumes of studies linking obesity as a SYMPTOM of several major disorders. It is to portray a false message to people with those disorders who will (as I did) cut back their eating more and more in an attempt to "cure" the disorders, instead of treating the disorders in order to stem the weight gain. And it is to reinforce the message that doctors do not have to think beyond "you're fat, so you need to eat less", when in fact there may be a serious health condition they are overlooking. If I had gotten treatment for my PCOS at 14 instead of 24, there might have been a chance that I would have been able to conceive a child. Instead, taking the doctors at their word (with all the attached emotional damage), I wound up starving myself, which caused irreparable damage to my liver and kidneys, and has ensured that even if I could carry to term (which is now less than 5% likely), I could never deliver without an overwhelming risk of kidney failure and diabetes.

I HATE JARED. I just have to say that outright. He has become the poster child for weight loss. Now, the claim goes that he got skinny eating Subway twice a day and nothing else. But what he doesn't tell you is that he walked to that Subway and back twice a day -- a total distance over over 2 miles a day. He also had a personal trainer and a nutritionist working with him. If I had those resources, I could lose weight eating nothing but Taco Bell taco salads or Wendy's chili or anything else I wanted. Jared's weight loss secret is not in what he ate, but what he didn't eat, and how he increased his activity level to boot. So, just on general principles, I hate him for portraying a false image and false hope to people who genuinely need assistance.

Okay, I admit it. I am fat. But I don't believe that simply because I am fat, I am unattractive. I don't believe that other people are unattractive simply because they are fat. In fact, I am more drawn and attracted to overweight women as sexual partners. And it's not because I think that I have a better shot with them or that they are somehow 'desperate' or anything like that. I simply tend to find them more attractive than the little stick figure women fighting their whole life to stay in a size 0. I think that a woman who has softness about her -- large breasts, round hips... and I like the belly, too! -- is so sexually arousing compared to a flat-chested, angular model that reminds me more of a pre-pubescent boy than a full-figured adult woman.

Whatever happened to 'caveat emptor'? Let the buyer beware. At what point did it become the producer's responsibility to shield the consumer? If the general public stopped buying the fast food, the fast food business would either go away or change to suit the demand. That's basic economics. But unless that happens, there is no incentive for the companies to do anything but what they have been doing. It doesn't take a rocket scientist with a brochure of nutrition information to know that the Big Mac is going to be far worse for you than, say, a bowl of broccoli. If the consumer eats the Big Mac anyway, then, as far as I'm concerned, they have basically entered into a social contract with McDonald's that says, "I understand how unhealthy this meal is for me, but I am going to eat it anyway and accept the consequences of that action". It's called accepting responsibility for one's actions, and it is sorely lacking in today's society.

Don Gorske -- they call him 'Big Mac'. This guy eats 2 or 3 Big Macs a day. Every day. As in, he ate close to 750 Big Macs last year. He loves the Big Mac. He has eaten over 19,000 Big Macs since the sandwich was first introduced. Now, if everything that this documentary says is true, Don Gorske should be 700 pounds, have liver failure, and a cholesterol score off the charts. The truth, though, is that Don Gorske is under 200 pounds, is very thin for his height, and his cholesterol? 140 -- well in the normal range. Once again, it's not just what you eat -- a lot of it has to do with metabolism and activity level.

This one is probably the stupidest point in the movie. The guy shows pictures of people to four first graders. One is George Washington, one is a stylized portrayal of Jesus, one is the Wendy's girl, and one is Ronald McDonald. Which one do you think these four first graders had the easiest time identifying? If you guessed Ol' Clowny, you're right. But, honestly, what does this prove? I don't know about you, but I wasn't taught about George Washington in first grade. Two of the children got it right, which forced the questioner to then ask, "And who was he?" just to prove his point (whatever that was). And Jesus? One of these first graders was very clearly of Middle-Eastern decent, and another looked Jewish. So, we can't really blame them, can we? And then the cracker white boy identified JC as (I kid you not) George W. Bush! (Which was topped off so wonderfully when the questioner replied, "Close!") Saying that first graders have been more exposed to Ronald McDonald than to George Washington does not demonstrate how insipid McDonald's is. If anything, it points to a deficiency in the school system, which this film was not about. Personally, if you really want to skew the results, throw in pictures of Elmo and SpongeBob and then see if Ronald is still the quickest one named. I don't think he would be.

While we're on the topic of the school system, another topic that got hit upon a couple of times was the lack of nutritional lunches in schools. The point was made that even those schools on the Federal School Lunch Program that are provided their meals by the USDA were getting prepackaged, over processed, high calorie, sugary, fatty foods. And it's probably true. The reason? It's cheaper. And with the way that Congress continues to cut education funding, that's not liable to change. Add to that this "Every Child Left Behind" nonsense, which has driven school after school to cut out recess and P.E. classes to make more time to study for the endless parade of meaningless standardized testing, and it's little wonder that we're winding up with fatter children. More literate, maybe; fatter, definitely. One school they visited, the children got 40 minutes of P.E. once a week. When I was in school, we had 40 minutes of recess and 55 minutes of P.E. every day of the week until 9th grade. And no one complained that we weren't learning enough. This is why I have always believed that home schooling or even parochial schooling is preferable to the public school system. It's a matter of better funding, realistic standards, and a balanced approach to education and health.

The guy making the documentary and shoveling in this grease pit of McDonald's has a girlfriend. She's a vegan, or at least, a vegetarian -- we're never told for sure. Point is that she is on this crusade extolling the virtues of a meat-free diet. She works up an organic detox diet for her boyfriend when the experiment is done, full of "cleansing" vegetables (her word). Let me explain something. Veganism is not healthy. The human body is designed to be omnivorous. This is why human beings have two kinds of intestinal tissue for digestion -- both that found in natural herbivores and that found in natural carnivores. Human beings also require a set of nine essential amino acids for healthy development. Those nine amino acids are the same nine found in the proteins of animal matter. Granted, it is possible to find all nine of those amino acids in purely non-animal sources, but literally none of them have all nine on their own the way that animal meat does.

And that's not the worst of it. Vitamin B-12 is another key nutrient necessary for human growth and development. It is involved in the metabolism of single-carbon fragments; essential for biosynthesis of nucleic acids, nucleoproteins, and red blood cells, and plays a role in the metabolism of nervous tissue. Vitamin B-12 is only found in one place in all of nature: animals and animal by-products. The true vegan has to take vitamin supplements to offset all that they lose by not eating meat -- and to stay perfectly true to veganism, these supplements can't be derived from animal material and so must be wholly synthetic. These supplements literally didn't exist a generation ago. Our parents and grandparents had to get their B-12 the old-fashioned way: by eating meat. But the obesity epidemic is happening now, not then. So, obviously, meat in and of itself isn't the problem.

(The preceding is not open for debate. This is not my opinion; this is scientific fact. If you push me, I will inundate you with links to source material. I do not want this to become the meat-eaters against the vegans. If you want to eschew animal products in all their forms, that's fine; I have no problem with you. But don't think for one moment that you can convince me that humans are "supposed" to be that way. Legions of biology and anatomy professors beg to differ.)

The various sections of this movie are introduced with these very surrealistic Dali-esque paintings portraying Ronald McDonald, accompanied by an overlaid title. The following comments come from the section entitled "Addiction".

Now, first off, let me show you, in part, what Merriam-Webster has to say about addiction: "compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance (as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal..." Fast food in and of itself is not habit-forming. We may get into the habit of grabbing a burger on our lunch break, but it is the convenience that breeds the habit, not the burger. Neither can one build a tolerance to fast food. The phrase, "I'm up to 5 Macs a day" is never heard. And fast food especially does not cause comparable withdrawal symptoms with other controlled substances. No one has ever gone to Betty Ford to get off McNuggets.

The word "addiction" is a hot button word. It's like "abortion" or "holocaust". People use these words when they want to violently and passionately inflate the topic of their ire without having sufficient data to do so. Now, it's true that fast food can inspire some of the same emotional responses as a line of cocaine or a hit off a joint. That's called "pleasure". Fast food tastes good -- it's created that way. If it tasted bad, no one would buy it. But that doesn't make it a controlled substance. No matter how much you say that fast food is addictive, it doesn't make it so. Ronald McDonald is not a drug lord, and the Hamburglar is not standing outside schools pushing Happy Meals onto little kids. As fired-up as this country is about the "war on drugs", if there was even the merest whisper of truth that something in the McShake was addictive, the FDA would be set upon by droves of bloodthirsty soccer moms demanding it be banned, McDonald's fined, and warning labels be slapped all over Grimace's giant purple ass.

Now, here comes this "expert" claiming that cheese on the Big Mac is an opiate. Not as an analogy either -- this guy is literally saying that cheese contains many of the same chemicals as opium. Wait until these heroin pushers hear this. They'll start cutting their heroin with powdered parmesan and increase their profit margins 10-fold! They'll be no stopping them! Of course, before we get too worked up, we have to keep in mind that this same "expert" was speaking earlier about how scientists can take the same drug that helps heroin addicts recover and give it to people who really enjoy chocolate, and the chocolate cravings reduce. He says this proves that chocolate is addictive. Which, even if it were true, says absolutely nothing about cheese, or for that matter, fast food in general! I know, let's put Don Gorske on this drug and see if he doesn't make it to 20,000 Big Macs. Then maybe we can talk about fast food being a drug.

Gastric Bypass surgery. The bane of my existence. I cannot tell you how many times I have been at the doctor's office, a wedding, the grocery store, or walking down a street, and a complete stranger comes up to me and says, "Honey, you should get that gastric bypass; it did wonders for me!" Of course, I'm polite and smile and nod, but what I want to say is, "That's great for you; that means you were an overeating sloth with low activity level and no self-control. But that doesn't mean that's what I am."

And it's true. My weight is a hormonal issue. Anyone who knows me can attest to how often I have to be forced to eat something during the course of a day. After being anorexic for several years, it is easy to fall back into the habit of genuinely forgetting to eat. I probably take in about 3/5 of the calories that the FDA recommends for most adults, and less than half of what these diet sites claim I should be taking in based on my weight. So, before you start telling me how great this surgery is, stop for a minute and think that maybe, just maybe, I'm not like you.

Oh, and another thing. These people with their gastric bypasses will be on nutritional supplements for the rest of their life in order to take in the quantity of vitamins and minerals that the body needs just to function on an everyday basis. Their stomachs are roughly the size of a large apple, and will hold only slightly more (after a few years, that is -- the remaining stomach pouch will stretch somewhat, but slowly). The ironic thing is that if they could have managed to drag themselves away from the ice-cream buffet or that double stack of ribs and done all the same aftercare that gastric bypass demands -- they would have lost the weight anyway and saved themselves the cost of the surgery!

Gastric bypass isn't a cure-all, nor is it instant weight-loss. In order to prevent the new reduced-capacity stomach from tearing open (which happens more often than the doctors like to admit), there is a strict diet that the patients must follow. Oddly enough, it's the same general diet that most nutritionists will give you if you went to them for weight-loss instead. It's a strict regimen of fewer calories and increased activity -- which is precisely what is necessary for weight loss for those of us who don't have our stomach stapled to our large intestine.

And on a final note, there is a little saying about the relationship between economics and politics: "He who has the money makes the rules." It's a harsh truth, but a truth nonetheless. This is why there are terms like "Big Oil" and "Big Tobacco". Companies with similar economic goals tend to band together in the face of regulatory legislation. These companies can bring a lot of money to political campaigns backing their preferred candidate, and can leverage a lot more through lobbying for the bills that are in line with their economic goals. The reason that Congress passed the "Cheeseburger Bill" (that makes it illegal for people to sue fast food companies for making them obese) is because the fast food industry has a very powerful lobby and throws a lot of money around in the right places. But where do they get all that money? You and me, of course -- by buying their products. If we didn't buy fast food, fast food wouldn't have any power. Which leads to another saying about the relationship between economics and politics: "Vote with your wallet."