Just watched the movie, "Super Size Me" by Morgan Spurlock which won a Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival for my Nutrition class. Spurlock goes on a 3-meal a day McDonald’s only diet for thirty days, and amazingly gains 24.5 pounds in that time as well as raising his cholesterol 68 points and adding potentially dangerous fat deposits to his liver. His diet contained about 12 pounds of fat and 30 pounds of sugar over the 30-day period.
While we don’t eat out at fast food restaurants very often (or even often enough, as far as I, the cook, might feel), it did emphasize the growing problem of obesity being the number two cause of avoidable death in this country–smoking being number one–and the struggle between the American way of life feeding into the corporate mindset and good eating habits that can promote good health.
Perhaps because I’m lucky enough to have a metabolism that keeps me at a constant weight set at 100 lbs., while I am very happy that films like this are being made to raise public awareness, I must say that the most enjoyable thing I’ll remember from it is one of the musical selections used that I hadn’t heard in a long time: "Fat Bottomed Girls" performed by Queen.
And I admit a severe craving right now for a Double Cheeseburger and McDonald fries.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology