FAST FOOD Part 1:

Filmmaker Records Effects of Eating Only at McDonald's for a Month

January 25, 2004

by DAVID USBORNE

NEW YORK, USA - Normally sane actors have been known to gain or lose huge amounts of weight for their art. Think of Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary. Directors, of course, never have to undergo such torture. Or so it used to be, until Morgan Spurlock had a bright idea for a film project. The first clue to his particular misery comes in the title of his documentary, which has become the darling of this year's Sundance Film Festival. It is called Super Size Me: A Film of Epic Portions and it is a sometimes comic but serious look at America's addiction to fast food. Spurlock, a tall New Yorker of usually cast-iron constitution, made himself the guinea pig in this dogged investigation into the effects of fast food on the body. He ate only at McDonald's for a month - three meals, every day - and took a camera crew along to record it. If a server offered to super-size his order, he was obliged to accept - and to ingest everything, gherkins and all.

Neither Spurlock, 33, nor the three doctors who agreed to monitor his health during the experiment were prepared for the degree of ruin it would wreak on his body. Within days, he was vomiting up his burgers and battling with headaches and depression. And his sex drive vanished. When Spurlock had finished, his liver, overwhelmed by saturated fats, had virtually turned to pate. "The liver test was the most shocking thing," said Dr Daryl Isaacs, who joined the team to watch over him. "It became very, very abnormal."

Spurlock put on nearly 12kg over the period and his cholesterol level leapt from a respectable 165 to 230. He told the New York Post: "I got desperately ill. My face was splotchy and I had this huge gut, which I've never had in my life ... It was amazing - and really frightening." And his girlfriend, a vegan chef? "She was completely disgusted by me," he said. Making the film over several months last year, Spurlock travelled through 20 states, interviewing everyone from fast-food junkies to the US Surgeon General and a lobbyist for the industry. McDonald's, for whom the film can only be a public relations catastrophe, ignored his repeated entreaties for comment.

Spurlock had the idea for the film on Thanksgiving Day 2002, slumped on his mother's couch after eating far too much. He saw a news item about two teenage girls in New York suing McDonald's for making them obese. The company responded by saying their food was nutritious and good for people. Is that so, he wondered? To find out, he committed himself to his 30 days of Big Mac bingeing.

The film does not yet have a distributor and, given the advertising clout of McDonald's, that may prove problematic. But the critics at Sundance seem to have been captivated. Certainly, the film is blessed by good timing. Obesity has in recent months captured headlines as America's new health scourge. The humour of the approach - and Spurlock's own suffering - obviously helps. At the festival in Park City, Utah, he has had teams handing out "Unhappy Meal" bags on the streets with a few "Fat Fun Facts". For instance, one in four Americans visits a fast-food restaurant every day. And did you know that McDonald's feeds more people around the world every day than the population of Spain? The makers have self-rated the film "F" - for "fat audiences".

McDonald's has finally been forced to comment. "Consumers can achieve balance in their daily dining decisions by choosing from our array of quality offerings and range of portion sizes to meet their taste and nutrition goals," it said in a statement last week.

Spurlock claims that the goal was not to attack McDonald's as such. Among the issues he highlights is the willingness of schools to feed students nothing but burgers and pizza. "If there's one thing we could accomplish with the film, it is that we make people think about what they put in their mouth," he said. "So the next time you do go into a fast-food restaurant and they say, 'Would you like to upsize that?' you think about it and say, 'Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll stick with the medium this time.'"




FAST FOOD Part 2:

Tastes Like (Mutant) Chicken
The great all-McDonald's diet test, and why
Ukrainians won't touch your toxic buffalo wings

26th January 2004, 06:51 PST KIEV, Ukraine (AP report)
By Mark Morford

So then from way, way over there in Ukraine comes this hilarious bit about how the country's customs officials just confiscated a whopping 19 tons of frozen U.S. chicken parts that smugglers claimed was sugar. That's right: The crooks were trying to smuggle American-grown chicken into Ukraine territory, which is all well and good except it's very illegal, given how the U.S. genetically modifies billions of its chickens and injects them with hormones and chemicals and toxins and feeds them ground-up chicken parts mixed with chicken feces and saws off their beaks and packs them by the tens of thousands into tiny nauseating disease-ridden cages in massive "Matrix"-like hellhole factory farms and treats them worse than you treat a skin boil.

Ukraine refuses to take this crap. U.S. officials insist our factory-farmed chicken is safe to eat. Ukrainian officials look at U.S. officials like they are childish Neanderthal idiots who must take the Ukrainian officials to be simpletons and fools. U.S. officials sneer and pout and stamp their feet and say eat our stupid noxious chicken parts goddammit. Ukrainian officials note how most of the U.S. officials are pale and sickly and obese and diabetic and precancerous and impotent and prematurely balding and sort of homely and piggish, and how seven of them just dropped dead on the spot from heart attacks just from stomping their angry little feet like that because they've eaten so many toxic chicken parts and now their bodies are saying, you know, screw you, I'm outta here.

America, of course, does not give a damn about Ukraine. America laughs at such petty Euro foolishness, as we slaughter billions of toxic hormoned chickens a year and happily munch away on fried/liquefied/reconstituted/McNuggeted garbage food by the ton and say see? See Ukrainian snob fools? We aren't dropping dead! We are just fine! Ha! We are still big strong superpower, cough cough groan hack spit! Except that we're not. Except that every day millions in this country wonder why they feel so sluggish and drained and ill, or why cancer and diabetes and heart disease and a thousand other ailments plague our big healthy superpower nation, when in fact much of the answer is right there, in our little Styrofoam boxes and in that greasy paper bucket or in that Safeway grocery bag or wrapped in that oily paper with all the little taco logos all over it. Our nation wears its denial like a bad neon suit. CLIP

References: http://www.factoryfarming.com/

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE - DIETARY RECOMMENDATIONS:

For those of you who watch what you eat, here's the final word on nutrition and health.
It's a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting medical studies!
Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Italians drink large amounts of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Germans drink lots of beer, eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like, SPEAKING ENGLISH is apparently what kills you!
(author unknown)

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