Supersize Me

by Angie Many

   By now you’ve probably heard about Morgan Spurlock, the nut who ate nothing but fast food from McDonald’s for 30 days and gained 25 pounds and 65 cholesterol points. Spurlock could have chosen items at McDonald’s other than Big Macs, shakes, and fries. Whenever a cashier asked if he wanted to ‘super size’ his meal, he could have refused -- but never did. He ate about 5,000 calories per day. He became ill.

   And he made a ‘documentary’, Supersize Me, of his binge. The anti-fast-food film was the rage at the ultra-liberal Sundance Film Festival; in fact, Spurlock won the Best Director prize. According to Chuck Muth (www.chuckmuth.com), “The ‘film’ is amateurish, second-rate, biased, boring, shallow, underhanded, disgusting, dishonest and nothing but pure warmed-over, bush-league, anti-business propaganda.” (Similarly, Michael Moore, virulent liberal filmmaker, was the toast of the anti-American Cannes Film Festival with his anti-Bush anti-war ‘documentary’, even though his previous ‘documentary’ about the Columbine school shootings was found to be shot through with errors and downright lies.)

   The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) reports that the mis-named Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is trying to use Spurlock’s film to promote its animal rights agenda. PCRM’s  president, who refers to cheese as ‘morphine on a cracker’, makes a guest appearance in the film. “The self-styled medical charity is really just an animal-rights front group (funded generously by PETA) with a vegetarian agenda. Now these two cons are teaming up to frighten Americans into accepting their dietary utopia,” noted CCF.

   Spurlock’s premise that McDonald’s ruins its customers’ health has already been debunked. Soso Whaley, an adjunct fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wanted to make a point about the “doom, alarmist, anti-everything attitude of certain individuals and organizations who want to control my life, your life, everyone’s life with little regard for individual tastes, freedom of choice and personal responsibility.” Whaley also ate only at McDonald’s for a month. She made sensible food choices (McDonald’s also offers grilled chicken and salads), limited her daily intake to 1,800 calories, lost 10 pounds, lowered her cholesterol by 40 points, and said she felt great. “I can’t believe all the attention over Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me film,” she said. “All he did was eat like a pig to make his point. She added that “The poison is in the dose.” Spurlock suffered ill effects, said Whaley, simply because ‘he ate like a troglodyte.’

   Spurlock and others who think they should control your lifestyle now affect your fast-food choices. McDonald’s is already phasing out its super-sized meals: not because customers protested that they were getting too fat or receiving too much food for their money, but because consumer advocates, media, and attorneys charge the chain with making its customers fat and unhealthy. It is no longer the consumers’ responsibility to control their own weight and health, these people are in effect saying. Fat or unhealthy folks are victims of slick marketing and are too stupid to make the right choices, so businesses should make healthy choices for their customers -- or they’ll be sued. As the tobacco litigants finally found courts receptive to their claims, so too will the fast-food litigants. Look for the next targets to be manufacturers and distributors of sweets like Twinkies.

   (The attorneys and ‘consumer advocates’ will never stop unless some changes are made. We need to start recalling activist judges, re-institute the ‘loser pays’ judicial system, and debunk the claims of politically-correct activist groups at every opportunity.

   The Presidents appoints many judges, and unfortunately President Bush has folded on this issue. The Senate has stalled many of his appointments and refused to consider others. There is a way to get around such obstructionism, but Bush has so far refused to take it. If he is not re-elected, Kerry will be appointing judges; now there’s a scary thought! If Bush is re-elected, we the people need to pressure him to do everything within his power to get conservative judges seated. -Ed.)