Quote from Nina:
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The New York Times this week marked the 20-year anniversary of the documentary “Supersize Me” with a newly energized critique of fast-food restaurants. As you might remember, “Supersize Me” featured the independent filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, eating nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days, with all possible items “super sized.” Spurlock wound up considerably fatter and sicker than when he started, making his film “the high-water mark in a tide of sentiment against fast food,”as the Times put it.
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I haven't dug around on the internet enough to find out if this next bit is true - but according to the Salad-Size Me guy, apparently Spurlock later admitted that there was a lot more going on than just eating McD's 3 times a day while he was filming Super-size Me:
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After a few delicious bites, I flashed back to Spurlock’s euphoria at the beginning of Super Size Me. In the film, he described his consecratory meal as “every 8-year-old’s dream”— marveling over a picture-perfect Big Mac that looked as good as it does in advertisements. A few days later, he was throwing up outside his car window. To monitor his health throughout the experiment, he’d enlisted a battery of doctors — including a cardiologist, a nutritionist, and a gastroenterologist — who helped measure the deleterious effects of his McDiet, like high blood pressure and decreased libido. (It’s worth noting that Spurlock later admitted to battling alcoholism during the film’s production, which calls the authenticity of some of his claims into question.)
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So did the alcoholism have anything to do with gaining so much weight? Getting so much sicker so quickly? Throwing up? All this during a period of only 30 days - he was supposed to have gained 25 lbs in 30 days with all his health stats getting worse and worse.
If you go by the revered calories in/calories out mantra, based on the standard "2,000 calorie (your needs may vary)" diet, he would have had to consume a total of 5,000 calories every single day in order to eat enough to gain that much weight. That meant consuming an extra 3000 calories daily: Three meals a day, each one at least 1,666 calories.
That would be pretty difficult to do with the breakfast menu , unless you ordered multiple McMuffins, plus hash browns, and a large coke to reach that calorie count at breakfast. (The Big Breakfast with Hotcakes comes closest with 1340 calories - would still need a drink over 300 calories to reach the goal of 1,666 calories for that meal) But supposedly Spurlock ate a different meal at each of the 3 meals every single day, so he would have been ordering 3 or 4 different things each day for breakfast most days. A little easier to do with the burger and fries menu for lunch and dinner, because the bigger burgers start at about 400 calories, and the large fries have almost 500 cals, plus you could add a large coke at nearly 300 cals, for a total of about 1200 cals. That still leaves another 400+ calories he would have needed to reach the 1666 calorie goal for that ONE meal though.
In the film, his health problems were all blamed on the amount of meat, fat, and overall calories he was consuming. But how much of that calorie count (as well as his deteriorating health) could be attributed to his alcohol consumption?
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Even if it turns out that Spurlock wasn't muddying the results of his experiment with several hundred (maybe 1,000... 2,000... or more?) calories of alcohol each day, it's clear from Naughton's experiment (which really only cut down somewhat on the total carbs consumed) it's very possible to eat McD's and LOSE weight.
I have very clear memories of some lady on some LC board (might have been ALC, might have been a defunct LC board - it's been a very long time ago) who ate LC at McD's almost every day, because with her job she didn't have another option for something to grab quickly for lunch. She would order a couple of regular burgers, a diet drink, no fries or pies, and then just toss the buns. She lost weight easily. I'm sure calories made a difference, since 2 regular McD's burgers minus the buns amounts to less than 300 calories. That's about the same number of calories in one of those tiny (and very unsatisfying) frozen diet meals, and yet she was quite satisfied on those 2 bunless burgers, with enough energy to do her very physical job all day.