What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Fatter

 Morgan Spurlock. If you recognize the name, then you probably already know that he went to those big golden arches in the sky last week. 

If you're not familiar with Mister Spurlock, I can give you the highlight of his resume: He made a documentary called Super Size Me back in 2004. It depicts one man's journey into the heart of McDonaldland. Morgan spent a month consuming only food from McDonald's and tracks the physical and mental effects of such a diet. 

Spoiler alert: The effects were not good. It was a shot across the bow of the fast food industry which at that time had become somewhat cavalier about the role it was playing in America's obesity epidemic. For those of you too young perhaps to remember when you could walk into Mickey D's and ask them to "super size" your meal by adding an extra large option to the already large portions available. Morgan Spurlock's first hand account of just what sort of abuse this sort of diet could dish out won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Not to mention the twenty-four additional pounds, increased cholesterol, mood swings, sexual dysfunction, and fat accumulation in his liver.

Mister Spurlock survived his self-imposed experiment, and lived to argue with critics who insisted that you could actually lose weight by eating only McFood. An interesting debate, perhaps, but the most telling reality is that McDonald's restaurants stopped offering the Super Size option six weeks after Spurlock's film opened. 

Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe McDonald's figured keeping their customers alive for a few more years might benefit their bottom line more than getting them to shell out a few extra bucks to get all the soda and fries that they could hold down. Considering the well-meaning documentarians who turn their cameras on the horrors of war or child labor who have yet to see the kind of cultural impact Mister Spurlock had with his feature, I would say he was a powerful force in society. Besides several other documentaries, he produced a TV show for FX called 30 Days in which he or surrogates undertook lifestyle challenges for a month to try and raise awareness around topics from living on minimum wage to life on an Indian reservation. 

Again, conditions on reservations have not changed much in twenty years, but minimum wage has finally made a step or two toward reality. Finally, Morgan Spurlock passed away at the relatively early age of fifty-three. My guess is that his Big Mac binging had little or nothing to do with the cancer that eventually took his life, but perhaps some young filmmaker will pick up the thread and investigate. Aloha Morgan, and thank you for stomping on the terra especially with those extra twenty-four pounds just long enough to bring a few more healthy options to our fast food lives.