Students chew the fat with ‘Super Size Me’ filmmaker

Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005 | 9:27 a.m.

"What the hell were you thinking?"

That's what "Super Size Me" director, producer and star Morgan Spurlock gets asked the most, he told UNLV students after a Tuesday night screening of his Oscar-nominated documentary.

The student-government sponsored lecture attracted more than 300 students, faculty and community members to a classroom auditorium at the university.

In the film, Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. The rules were simple: If McDonald's doesn't sell it, he couldn't consume it, he had to say yes anytime they asked him to super size a meal and he had to try everything on the menu at least once.

Including the fish filet.

Throughout his $788, monthlong "McDiet," Spurlock chronicles the drastic effects to his health. By day 21, his doctors, his mother and his vegan girlfriend were begging him to quit.

It was his older brother in West Virginia, Spurlock told UNLV students, who talked him into finishing the experiment.

In the end, the previously fit Spurlock gained 24.5 pounds, saw his cholesterol shoot up 65 points to 230 and damaged his liver so badly with his fat intake that three doctors compared it to an alcoholic's.

He also became addicted to the food, Spurlock said, including experiencing depression when he wasn't eating it and mood lifts when he was.

For three days after he ended his McDonald's binge, he endured "mass withdrawals," including shaking and sweating fits along with massive headaches.

"To this day, if I smell a Big Mac my mouth waters like Pavlov's dogs," said Spurlock, who hasn't touched the stuff since his McDiet days. "It's pathetic."

That fast food is bad for you seems like a simple conceit, but Spurlock said neither he nor the doctors realized how bad it would be.

He embarked on the journey after watching a news story about two teenage girls who were suing McDonald's for making them fat. What got to him was not the girls' claims, Spurlock said, but that of a McDonald's spokesperson who claimed the food was nutritious and could be part of a healthy diet.

From its first award at the Sundance Film Festival to its current Oscar nomination for best documentary, the movie has made waves across the country and in 60 different countries with its portrayal of fast food's role in the nation's obesity epidemic. It picks on McDonald's, Spurlock said, because it is the biggest chain around, but it also attacks school lunches, physical education and Americans' focus on healing the sick instead of keeping people well.

The movie has its share of critics, both in and out of the food industry, and a handful of UNLV students joined that illustrious crowd Tuesday night by handing out McDonald's fries and apple pies post lecture.

One sophomore political science and history major with the group even dressed up as the McDonald's Hamburglar.

"We came here to have some fun and show another side to Morgan Spurlock," said the Hamburglar, also knows as 23-year-old Nick Peterson.

Peterson, who munched on a McDonald's burger and fries during the end of Spurlock's question and answer session, contended that Spurlock got sick because he ate two to three times what a normal person would in a single day and purposely cut out exercise.

On a flier he handed out to students with the fat-laden fries, it says that the students found Spurlock's film entertaining, but not entirely truthful.

And, "we like our Super-Sized meals more than we liked him."

"We came here promoting personal responsibility and not government regulation of our food," Jennifer Cooper, a junior biology major said.

"If you eat it (McDonald's) in moderation, it's OK."

Spurlock understands their critique, but he says that most Americans aren't eating in moderation.

"The fact is that we live in a country where we overeat daily," Spurlock said.

Spurlock said he overate and didn't exercise to mimic those in America who do the same. After the lecture, he confessed that he kept overeating even after he got sick because he decided that "if I'm going to finish the movie, I'm going to finish it happy."

In one scene following the push to get him to quit, Spurlock gets annoyed that one McDonald's is out of vanilla milkshakes.

Spurlock addressed the criticisms against his movie throughout most of his lecture, which came off more as a stand-up comedy routine then an academic lesson.

Most of the time Spurlock made fun of the "coincidences" of McDonald's cutting out super sizes and adding the "Go Active" Adult Happy Meals just as his film was coming out. He also expressed alarm that McDonald's was developing a workout film for kids using the same Ronald McDonald clown that lured them to eat burgers and fries in the first place.

He was glad, however, that McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants were taking some steps in the right direction, and encouraged students to "vote with their forks" to convince them to do more.

"You can never negate personal responsibility for this (obesity)," Spurlock said. "... But a corporation that feeds 46 million a day can't claim innocence either."