Super Size Me (PG-13) 2004
Director: Morgan Spurlock
Genre: Documentary
DVD Release Date: September 28, 2004
Run Time: 96 minutes
Fast food has never meant healthy food. We order processed meat, processed cheese, and processed potatoes, served up with sugar in a liquid form to wash it down. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock decides to test the results of a fast food diet by eating three meals a day at McDonald's for thirty days. The rules: eat everything on the menu at least once and only super size the meal if asked by the cashier.
The results are profound in their enormity, even to the three doctors and nutritionist who analyze Spurlock's progress. More than just a food log tracking the eating habits of a man on a Mickey D's binge, Super Size Me looks at the processed convenience foods industry, examining the ways food marketers find to infiltrate the minds of children, building a pattern of lifelong bad eating habits. Like many advocates attempting to drive an important point home, Morgan Spurlock takes fast food to an extreme, demonstrating the potential for a diet filled with excess sugar and unhealthy fats.
If you ever need motivation to kick your current eating habits and get back in shape this movie should be part of your permanent video collection. Whenever you start to fall off the wagon, pop in Super Size Me and the sodas, fries, and sugar-laden products will be off the menu replaced by a diet free from hydrogenated oils and refined sugars. The DVD extras go beyond the material in the movie to further drive home several key points about the unhealthy nature of fast food.