#246597 - 17/01/2005 07:10
Super Size Me
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pooh-bah
Registered: 09/09/2000
Posts: 2303
Loc: Richmond, VA
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I just watched this movie. Oh my god. I never want to eat fast food again. I highly recommend renting this one. Make sure to watch the extras too, I don't want to spoil it, but you won't BELIEVE how long McDonald's fries last just sitting out.
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#246598 - 17/01/2005 08:01
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: mschrag]
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member
Registered: 09/06/1999
Posts: 106
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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Yeah, great movie. I had already changed my lifestyle prior to seeing this film (a couple years ago now) but I couldn't count the number of times he was describing the effects and going, "yes, yes, it was like that..."
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#246599 - 17/01/2005 21:17
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: mschrag]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12338
Loc: Sterling, VA
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I do want to see the movie, but I'd be interested to know (from you who have seen it) who this movie is aimed at. Is it aimed at the few people who don't think that this food is bad for you? I mean, who on earth would think that eating like that would be good? There's lots of food that's bad for you, and you wouldn't eat three meals a day for any period of time.
Hey, I eat at McDonalds. The food is damn good (at least to me it is). That doesn't mean I think it's good for me. Besides, I never super size because I can't eat that much at once. I also don't eat there more than once or twice a month.
While I think it's fascinating to look at the effects of the experiment, I want to know what the experiment is supposed to prove. Does he offer some sort of hypothesis at the top of the film?
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Matt
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#246600 - 17/01/2005 21:40
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: Dignan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 23/09/2000
Posts: 3608
Loc: Minnetonka, MN
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I think it's aimed at people that want to blame mcdonalds for them being fat.
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Matt
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#246601 - 18/01/2005 02:23
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: Dignan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
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I agree. While that film is entertaining, who in their right mind would eat there that much for a month straight? Hell, if I ate at any restaurant three times a day for a month I'd probably gain a lot of weight and/or get sick from it. While I think it's good that people know this stuff isn't good for you, I also think people should have the right to treat themselves from time to time without feeling guilt.
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Brad B.
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#246603 - 18/01/2005 11:08
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: Dignan]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 09/09/2000
Posts: 2303
Loc: Richmond, VA
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Quote:
I do want to see the movie, but I'd be interested to know (from you who have seen it) who this movie is aimed at.
I don't really know who it is aimed at, I just know I found it to be fascinating.
Edit:
Quote:
Does he offer some sort of hypothesis at the top of the film?
A large % of the nutrionists in the film basically say "you should never eat fast food". Now I find that to be pretty silly. But in my mind, the hypothesis is basically "if you eat too much of this stuff it can SERIOUSLY [censored] you up" -- and that's not really just a hypothesis, it's pretty well proven by his lab results. Do with the information what you will, I just thought it was an interesting experiment.
Edited by mschrag (18/01/2005 11:11)
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#246604 - 18/01/2005 11:16
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: bonzi]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 09/09/2000
Posts: 2303
Loc: Richmond, VA
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Quote:
McNuggets
Don't see the movie, they have a pretty gross animation about making McNuggets 
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#246605 - 18/01/2005 11:19
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 09/09/2000
Posts: 2303
Loc: Richmond, VA
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Quote:
who in their right mind would eat there that much for a month straight?
I agree his approach was to take it to the extreme, but they point out that there are a huge number of people who eat at McDonald's 3+ times a week. From seeing what happened to him, you gotta believe that's doing some not-nice things to the body. Now I say this, but I don't mind hitting Arby's on a semi-regular basis But the movie definitely puts a lot of it in perspective.
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#246606 - 18/01/2005 11:21
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: mschrag]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 25/08/2000
Posts: 2413
Loc: NH USA
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Sheesh...almost all food processing is nasty.  Jello anyone? -Zeke
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#246607 - 18/01/2005 12:33
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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member
Registered: 09/06/1999
Posts: 106
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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There are lots of people not in their right minds. Seriously. Eating can be addictive, and fast food doubly so.
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#246608 - 18/01/2005 14:54
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Quote:
if I ate at any restaurant three times a day for a month I'd probably gain a lot of weight and/or get sick from it.
Is it your hypothesis, then, that all restaurants serve bad-for-you food? Or that three times a day is too much? Or that restaurants serve too much food? Or all of the above?
Obviously McDonald's is bad for you. At the same time, why? The ingredients, on the surface, don't seem to be that bad. Assuming you're talking about Big Macs (I haven't seen the film), iit's two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. So, okay, beef isn't that great for you, but, let's face it, you're not getting much beef on a fast food burger. Then there's the cheese, which I'm sure is American "cheese" or something like it, which isn't that good for you, but, again, it's not all that much. And the bun, I'm sure, is so white that there's not much nutritional value. And the lettuce is cheap Iceberg lettuce, I'm sure, so there's not much of anything there. Oh, the special sauce. That's probably mostly mayonnaise, so lots of fat. But vegetable fat, probably, which isn't all that bad for you, especially when it's not been hydrogenated or overheated. That leaves the fries and the soda. The fat in the fries is going to be really bad. I'm sure it's vegetable fat, but it's almost definitely been overheated, so it's probably become a trans fat, which is likely to be worse for you than animal fat. And then the soda is basically pure sugar. Which isn't that bad for you until you consume it in those massive quantities.
I'd bet that there are two things at fault. One, simply too many calories. This is probably exacerbated by him accepting super-sizes when offered. Two, all the trans fat in those fries. Of course, probably less so for him, since he was eating, likely, whether he really felt like it or not. (One of the problems with trans fats are that they don't activate the receptors that tell your body that its satiated like normal fats do.)
I'd argue that virtually every restaurant in the US has oversized portions, and I think that that has a lot to do with our collective obesity, especially when you add on that admonition that all of our mothers gave us: "Eat all your food. There are children starving in China, you know."
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Bitt Faulk
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#246609 - 18/01/2005 15:26
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: wfaulk]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 15/01/2002
Posts: 1866
Loc: Austin
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#246610 - 18/01/2005 15:45
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: RobotCaleb]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Hmm. Probably switching to canola oil, which can survice higher temperatures. Personally, I'd rather they still cooked them in animal fat, since it can survive high temperatures unscathed and actually makes you feel full. Of course, I can totally understand vegetarians not wanting that.
It seems to me that science is coming at us all the time and telling us that what we're eating is bad for us, so another branch of science goes and creates something else, only for it to be discovered many years later that that new thing is just as bad, if not worse. Personally, I think that just eating what the human race ate for millennia is probably the right thing. Of course, that does preclude advancements in foods, but I have yet to see anything that was really a benefit. (Other than hydrogenated vegetable oils making Oreos possible. Mmmmm. Oreos.)
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Bitt Faulk
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#246611 - 18/01/2005 15:47
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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I also wanted to point out that I think this is why Atkins seems to work for people. It's not the carbs, it's the fact that they're not consuming trans fats and getting full in a timely manner. Atkins and similar seem to be the only way to do that based on the fact that virtually every food these days has a trans fat in it, except for meat. That's just a theory, though.
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Bitt Faulk
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#246612 - 18/01/2005 20:09
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
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My point is that anything in excess is bad. And any restaurant tends to be less healthy than eating at home. They usually cook with a lot of greese, butter and oils. If I get breakfast at a diner, it's certainly not the same eggs, toast and hashbrowns I'd have in my dining room. McDonalds is just being singled out because of their market share.
I read "Fast Food Nation" from cover to cover and when I was done, I just said "So what?" But then, I'm a vegetarian, so I guess I was already grossed out. In a similar way, I was at dinner last night with a group of people and I couldn't understand how they were so grossed out by the idea of eating rattlesnake (the topic had come up) as they sat there eating their quale, cow, lamb and fish. To me, it's all the same. But I still think they should be allowed to eat what they want.
If anything, this film is just A) a funny way of not so gently reminding people that too much of anything is bad and B) a way to preach to the anti-corporation crowd.
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Brad B.
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#246613 - 18/01/2005 21:03
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: wfaulk]
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addict
Registered: 24/07/2003
Posts: 500
Loc: Colorado, N.A.
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Quote:
Personally, I'd rather they still cooked them in animal fat,...
Bingo! Any time I see "We use only 100% [insert the word hydrogenated here] Vegetable Oil!" in an eating establishment, I know they're full o' crap. That stuff can't be processed properly by the human digestive tract, like a lot of the "newer foods" to which you allude.
But like you, I can be a big, fat, Oreo-spewing hyprocrite, as well!
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-- DLF
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#246614 - 18/01/2005 21:03
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Quote:
any restaurant tends to be less healthy than eating at home
I disagree. Sure, any diner or whatever is likely to use "bad" ingredients, but nicer places don't. Then again, if you're eating French food, that's like 90% butter anyway. At the same time, a reasonably nice restaurant is going to be using more fresh foods instead of stuff that's full of hydrogenated oils, which are used because of their long shelf life. The stuff you eat at home isn't going to be any better. In fact, because I'm such a lousy cook, most of the stuff I eat at home is prepackaged crap, which is probably worse or just as bad as fast food. But even if I were to cook at home, I'd probably use the same grease, butter, and oils the restaurants would. I mean, I'm not sure how you prepare eggs, toast, and hashbrowns, but I can't imagine that the butter you fry your eggs in or the butter you put on your toast is any different than the butter that your diner uses. The only difference I can see is that one or the other of you use margarine instead, which is just bad in a slightly different way than butter. It's not like using more makes it more greasy, mostly. If you use too much, it just sits on the grill waiting for the next short-order item. (We're not talking about deep-frying here, and even if we were, the temperature of the oil has much, much, more to do with the level of oil left in the cooked food than the "amount" of oil used to cook in does.)
So unless you boil or bake all of your food, you're not getting any less grease than at a restaurant. (Of course, since you're a vegetarian, the chances of you doing just that is probably dramatically increased.)
My point is that anything in excess is bad, and the excess most to blame is calories. Restaurants simply serve too much food in the US and we as a culture have to learn to stop eating. Stop going to the all-you-can-gorge buffets. Eat half your entree. Eat more lower-calorie-per-volume foods. Stop ordering a diet Coke with your 12 pound steak and stop slathering pure fat and sugar on top of your salads and pretending it's not bad for you.
I just don't think that restaurant food in and of itself is as bad for you as you claim. Nicer restaurants aren't death traps. They make food as well as you can make it at home. And, sure, a greasy spoon is likely to be worse for you. There is marginally more grease there than a nicer place. But that grease also lets your body know that it's full. If we'd listen to our bodies instead of letting culture tell us that we need to clean that plate, we'd be less fat. And I'm guilty of it, too.
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Bitt Faulk
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#246616 - 18/01/2005 21:08
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: DLF]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Well, in their defense, somewhat, it's probably not hydrogenated oil they're using. They're probably using regular vegetable oil. But once they heat it too much, it turns into transfatty acids, which are the bad things in hydrogenated oils, just gotten to by a different process. Of course, the thing is that most of these places are using it in a deep-fat fryer or similar, which means they have to get it that hot. Otherwise whatever they're frying will just come out a hot soggy mess instead of a nice crisp fry/chicken part/fish fillet/whatever.
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Bitt Faulk
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#246617 - 18/01/2005 21:12
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: wfaulk]
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addict
Registered: 24/07/2003
Posts: 500
Loc: Colorado, N.A.
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Yep. I was combining the two in my rant (hydrogenated oil & super-heated, fry-vat style, trans-fatty vege oil). I say tomato.... 
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-- DLF
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#246618 - 18/01/2005 21:28
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: DLF]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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All this talk of unhealthy fats and horrible fast food makes me yearn for the days of the old fashioned McDonald's apple pies... You know the ones that were deep fried in beef fat... I know that they were bad for you, but I do miss them every now and then...
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Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs
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#246619 - 18/01/2005 21:49
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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I've been looking around on the goold old internet, and it appears that overheating vegetable oils may not, in fact, produce trans fats. There are more pages on the "it does" side, but those that have references seem to be kinda ... flaky. The ones on the "it doesn't" side seem to be more reputable.
On the other hand, just because I don't think that McD's doesn't use hydrogenated oils in their deep fat fryers doesn't mean that they don't. After all, the biggest (only?) plus to hydrogenated oils is that they have a very long shelf life, and the fat in a vat would be one of the things a typical McD's would keep around the longest. But somehow I doubt that the oil solidifies overnight. That would just be too disgusting. But I could be wrong.
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Bitt Faulk
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#246620 - 18/01/2005 22:20
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: pgrzelak]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14491
Loc: Canada
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Actually, the McD's I worked at in the mid/late 1970's used white shortening (melted) for this, with separate vats for fries, fish, and pies.
Cheers
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#246621 - 18/01/2005 22:28
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Well, there you go. Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil it is, then.
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Bitt Faulk
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#246622 - 19/01/2005 00:57
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: pgrzelak]
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addict
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 510
Loc: NY
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Quote:
All this talk of unhealthy fats and horrible fast food makes me yearn for the days of the old fashioned McDonald's apple pies... You know the ones that were deep fried in beef fat... I know that they were bad for you, but I do miss them every now and then...
Ahh, but Kentucky Fried Chicken still does deep fry them, and they are good. It's almost enough to make me stop boycotting them.
And this avoiding stuff that is "bad for you" isn't always the healthiest of behaviors. People go off the deep end with that as well.
I guess moderation got tossed out of 'merican culture along with the concept of personal responsibility.
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Heather
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." -Susan B Anthony
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#246624 - 19/01/2005 03:10
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: wfaulk]
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addict
Registered: 24/07/2003
Posts: 500
Loc: Colorado, N.A.
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I say tomatoe....
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-- DLF
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#246626 - 19/01/2005 06:48
Re: Super Size Me
[Re: pca]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
Damn. that's made me hungry and I don't have any eggs in the house.
Tempting. I do have some eggs in the house. Unfortunately, I'm at work now, but I guess I could do something like that when I get home...
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-- roger
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