Morgan Spurlock’s documentary ‘Super Size Me’ made him millions

It was an experience that many documentarians would have preferred to pass up, but one that a self-confessed attention seeker like Morgan Spurlock was happy to embark on.

“What would happen if I only ate McDonalds for 30 days straight,” he asked on camera. “Would I suddenly be on track to become an obese American? Would this be excessively dangerous? Let’s find out – I’m ready.

What did What happened was “Super Size Me,” a hit, Oscar-nominated documentary in 2004 that made Spurlock, then 33, an unlikely star and sparked an international debate about the harmful effects of a fixation on fast food.

Spurlock ate at McDonald’s restaurants three times a day, consuming every item sold at least once, and never eating or drinking anything that wasn’t on the menu – or so he claimed.

Every time the staff offered to increase his share, as they often did, he took it. He also exercised less – walking a maximum of 1.5 miles per day – to match the limited physical activity of the average American.

By the end of the experiment, Spurlock had gained nearly 25 pounds and suffered from increased cholesterol levels, depression, sexual dysfunction, fatigue, tremors, and a buildup of fat in his liver.

“Super Size Me” certainly captured the mood of the American public – a country where nearly 100 million people (about 60 percent of adults) were overweight or obese at the time.

Created on a budget of just $65,000, the film grossed more than $22 million, prompted McDonald’s to quietly drop its “super size” option on meals, and made Spurlock a household name.

News broke last week that, 20 years to the day after the release of his film, Spurlock had died of cancer at the age of just 53. But unfortunately, his complicated and – by his own admission – troubled past now threatens to overshadow his success in exposing the harmfulness of waste. food. A revelation he later revealed wasn’t as simple as we were led to believe.

Spurlock’s short life was marked by accusations of sexual misconduct, as well as private struggles with alcoholism, depression and infidelity. Some of which have allowed the fast food industry’s allies to question its urgent warnings about unhealthy diets.

Indeed, shortly after the film’s release, questions emerged about whether Spurlock had played it entirely fair.

Critics pointed out that he repeatedly ignored his nutritionist’s advice that his fast-food diet gave him 5,000 calories a day when he only needed half that.

Spurlock was accused of bingeing for fun – so much so that McDonald’s countered that such overconsumption of any food would have had the same consequences regardless of where someone was eating.

Then, in 2009, came the documentary “Fat Head,” in which health writer and comedian Tom Naughton challenged the accuracy of Spurlock’s calorie and fat statistics, noting his refusal to publish the food diary which he held during the filming of “Super Size Me”.

In another anti-Spurlock documentary, “Me & Mickey D,” director Soso Whaley claimed that she lost She gained weight and lowered her cholesterol levels while copying Spurlock’s McDonald’s diet – except she exercised regularly and didn’t consume more than she normally wanted to eat.

And then there was the matter of Spurlock’s weakened liver.

One of the most gripping and memorable moments in “Super Size Me” came when the doctors monitoring him warned him to abandon his experiment after blood tests showed that his liver had quickly become so badly damaged that it looked like it was being “stripped”. with heavy alcohol consumption.

His liver looked like that of an “alcoholic after a binge,” a doctor said.

However, in 2006, a Swedish university made headlines after it replicated Spurlock’s experiment in laboratory conditions and discovered that the liver changes were “never as dangerous.”

It wasn’t until 2017 that we learned the truth, as those documentary doctors’ comparisons to the effects of excessive drinking proved all too accurate: Spurlock eventually admitted that he hadn’t may not have adhered religiously to the McDonald’s menu during filming, and that he drank alcohol – a lot.

The confession took place in December of that year and saw Spurlock quit his production company after publishing a surprisingly candid #MeToo mea-culpa blog post – titled “I’m part of the problem” – in which he revealed his his own past sexual misconduct, as well as his alcoholism.

He said he had been accused of rape at university – which he denied while admitting both parties were drunk – and that he had settled a sexual harassment allegation made within his own company production eight years earlier.

“I would call my assistant ‘hot pants’ or ‘sex pants’ when I was yelling at her from across the office,” he said. “Something I thought was funny at the time, but then I realized I had completely belittled and belittled her to the point where she no longer existed.”

Spurlock, who as of 2017 had been married three times and had two sons by estranged wives, was clearly in a confessional mood as he also confessed to his serial “infidelity.”

He said he had been “unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I ever had”, adding: “Over the years I would look each of them in the eye and proclaim my love, then I would have having sex with other people behind their backs.”

He was “someone who constantly hurt those close to me,” including family, friends and co-workers, he said.

Seeking to understand why he behaved this way, he revealed that he had been sexually abused as a child and teenager – abuse he only told his first wife about “for fear of being seen as weak “. He also blamed his father for leaving his mother when he was a young child.

“Or is it because I’ve been drinking regularly since I was 13?” » he wondered. “I haven’t been sober for more than a week in 30 years, something our society neither rejects nor condemns, but which only filled the emotional void in me and the daily depression I was dealing with face.”

That message effectively ended his career overnight: within days, YouTube backed out of a distribution deal for the release of “Super Size Me 2,” and all of his other film and television projects dried up. .

But it was the revelations about alcohol that infuriated fans the most.

Spurlock — who entered rehab as his business imploded — had admitted to being drunk almost the entire time he was filming “Super Size Me.” This is a fact that could well explain the accumulation of fat in his liver, not to mention the tremors he was reporting.

Her confessional message also made clear her “depression” prior to filming.

And yet, despite all of this, he had expressly told a doctor on camera that he was not drinking alcohol at the time.

Spurlock declined to comment further on the matter, leaving some to wonder how otherwise he could have lied.

His film survives and is still often used as a teaching aid in high school health classes. But maybe, like the 590-calorie Big Mac, it should come with a warning.