Supersize Me

I don’t normally do movie reviews yet this is my second in less than a week. Both are shockumentaries which is a new form of documentary meant to shock you into agreeing with the director of the movie.

This time its Supersize Me which is essentially an anti-commercial for McDonalds. I haven’t eaten at McDonalds in over five years and I don’t plan to ever again, so I guess I was already there in terms of the main purpose of the movie.

The director, Morgan Spurlock, eats nothing but McDonalds food for 30 days and gets pretty sick doing it. No surprises there. I used to get sick after eating one meal at McDonalds.

But what really got me was the stuff about obesity and school lunches. Over 60% of americans are overweight. Many of us are very overweight – ie obese. And the rate of obesity in our kids is an epidemic that we are doing nothing about.

Morgan spends a lot of time in this movie going around to school cafeterias and looking at the food that is offered. He also goes one step further and actually looks at what the kids are really eating. It’s awful. Our kids are being offered processed food full of sugar, fat, and carbs. On top of that, they don’t eat what they don’t like and eat only the stuff they want. So they end up with an even more unbalanced meal.

This is not a great movie, but you could take about 30-45 minutes of footage from it and make an incredible short film that should be shown in every school in the country to teach our kids what to eat and why they need to eat well. It would scare the shit out of them.