Eating at McDonald’s is like having sex with your ex. For a brief moment you feel high but eventually end up with stomachache for the rest of the day.
My wife told me the other day as a joke.
I wondered for a second if it was true – not the part with the ex but that with McD’s. I remember it happening to me more than once when I couldn’t control my famine and succumbed to momentary craving and stepping into a plastic-looking restaurant ordered a Big Mac.
Later with crunches in my belly I would wonder how come that anybody would want to eat here.
From the perspective of an adventurer, I didn’t give a damn about McDonald’s. It was almost invisible to me.
From a perspective of an entrepreneur, I’ve respected Ray Kroc very much.
From a perspective of a person who has just eaten one of his Big Macs, I hated him.
How it gained its popularity so much by selling that poison?
A Bad Dream
Studying McDonald’s triggered some other deeper questions, like why would someone sleep with his exes and why would keep accepting to have the stomach sore again and again?
A true masochism or was there any deeper connection than just a superficial flirt with your old classmate?
Maybe it was just a Freudian reflex, the one that makes you stick to the known positive stimulants from childhood promising you would be OK.
Or, was there possibly a clasp of post-toddler addiction or a just desire to prove oneself something that was a fantasy or part of ego or maybe so sick that there’s no word to describe it?
Eating at McD’s makes for a great feeling as does conquering your ex again. It’s a proof that you’re not junk, that you’re worthy, that she or he still loves you and accepts you.
But does it prove that she’s not junk?
You can’t even remember why you broke up. It’s great, smells good, now they have even salads – wow how healthy – but you go for the Big Mac, as always.
Yummy.
No, crap! Stomachache again. I won’t be seeing this joint for long time. Probably, never again! Yuck!
Morgan Spurlock and McDonald’s
We all remember Super Size Me, that 2004 documentary movie where Morgan Spurlock for 30 days ate exclusively McDonald’s food and got seriously sick. His cholesterol levels hit dangerous high as did fatty accumulations in his liver. He experienced mood swings, depression, heart palpitations and sexual dysfunction.
Spurlock was a good boy. He had exercised, didn’t drink, his girlfriend cooked only vegetarian things and he looked like Wyatt Earp.
As Wyatt Earp was preparing himself for the battle against McLaury’s cowboys at O.K. Corral, our Morgan Spurlock was preparing himself for the battle against McDonald’s cowboys. He also needed assistance of Doc Holiday. Doc was to confirm that he was healthy prior to the experiment.
He was an American Mahatma Gandhi protesting to bring freedom to Americans from their bad eating habits just as Gandhi brought freedom to India from the British, only that the latter lost 25 pounds by doing it and the former was about to gain.
The movie was a huge success. It made him 11 million dollars on the box office out of some $ 65,000 investment in the budget. People obviously hated McDonald’s so much that they couldn’t wait to see someone proving its unworthiness publicly.
There’s inherently something in us being jealous at success stories.
Spurlock apparently succeeded and reportingly millions of people thought over their diet and changed it. In addition, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) launched a, after my opinion, not so great and useful “Consequences” ad that tried to persuade people to consider vegetarian diet instead of Big Mac. OK, McD’s makes you sick, but showing a dead corpse is a bit exaggerated and lack of good taste and manners.
But was there any truth in Spurlock’s experiment, or was Spurlock just another Michael Moore who reads the facts half-drunk?
Two years later, in 2006, Fredrik Nyström, doctor and associate professor at the University of Linköping’s department of internal medicine in Sweden, with distinguished humor and some extra cash in his research budget, decided to do something “fun, something lasting”. He admitted that ever since watching Super Size Me he had been thinking of how, in all the studies of obesity and metabolism, there was no objective clinical study. So, he came up with an idea to pay his students all the beer, booze and fast food stuff for one month. He didn’t have to wait for long for the volunteers.
Although his participants gained some weight, Nyström’s results couldn’t verify problems with liver and mood swings Spurlock mentions, so Nyström pondered if he have had an undiagnosed problem with his liver or “Maybe his hardcore vegetarian girlfriend held him to a low-energy diet, making him incapable of coping with this kind of food.”
Tom Naughton’s Fat Head
One of the best documentaries about diet, I have ever watched, was Tom Naughton’s 2009 bologna- debunking Fat Head. Just as Johnny Behan spread bad reputation about Wyatt Earp, so has Tom about Spurlock.
He repeated the Spurlock’s experiment by eating at McD’s but under certain rules. Tom consciously decided that he won’t eat more than 2000 calories a day and that he’ll stay short of carbs as much as possible. That meant no sandwiches, coke or fries, which taste awful anyway. After 28 days of cheeseburgers, he lost 12 lbs., and his MBI plummeted from 31 to 28.
He proved his point and that is, that a person has common sense and freedom of choice. You don’t have to order coke and fries if they offer you and still enjoy a good hamburger without bad consciousness. He made a point that it isn’t McDonald’s responsible for anyone’s obesity issues, but the person himself.
He further criticized Spurlock’s calories math, which in no case can even be close to 5,000 calories which Doc Holiday mentions, more or less pointing out that Spurlock has lied. McLaury is not guilty.
At first I didn’t understand why is Mr. Naughton trying to debunk Spurlock. Had he really thought that McDonald’s is innocent or a good restaurant suggestion? Then I finally got it. Tom had nothing personal against Spurlock nor was he paid by McDonald’s to return the company’s honor. He just didn’t like Spurlock’s Wyatt Earp style.
Kidding.
What makes Tom Naughton documentary special, is that he’s trying to be objective and not just a cheerleader, like Spurlock, who needed to exaggerate facts to make a point and simplified everything to good guys and bad guys scenario, presenting to, in his opinion, stupid masses only what they want to hear (like Wyatt Earp did).
Nutrition and great scientific theories tend to suffer from simplification and tendency to find supreme offender for all of the world’s problems. People have this need to identify themselves, enlist, becoming addicted to potent phrases like low-fat diet, cut the carbs, saturated fat causes the high cholesterol, burn the witches, E=mc2. They need a political agenda to find a meaning, and sweep off any blame they themselves might have been carrying on the shoulders.
Tom Naughton took on USDA, FDA and the whole nutritionists conspiracy since 1950s, that was serving the people one bad elegant theory after another. All false, oversimplified, unchecked.
Starting with infamous Ancel Keys, the father of lipid hypothesis in the 1960s, over the Senator Robert McGovern that insisted that low-fat diet should be included into national health guidelines, without any scientific backing. He showed how the government cut the funding to all the doctors that refused to comply to low-fat propaganda of the senator McGovern.
He further criticized one-sided and vegetarian-biased Center for Science in the Public Interest approach, which is trying to influence the government to act on the people, as they are “too weak and too stupid to give in to temptation.”
He found out that traditional wisdom and recipes are far more useful then USDA guidelines and one of the reasons why people got so big in the last 40 years could be the very guidelines that the government imposed on school cantinas, doctors and which include high-carb diet and which is, according to increasing new evidence that is surging, completely wrong.
During the years, I myself gained and lost weight many times and tried different diets, slowly getting clue what works and what doesn’t. Maybe the most important advice would be that of Tom Naughton’s doctor who told him that diet should be the one you can keep with till the rest of your life. If you’re interested in my dietary advice, you can find it here.
Finally, we should ask what happened to our hero Morgan Spurlock?
After realizing that people continued eating at McDonald’s even after his documentary was released, he was so disappointed that he entered a severe depression and gone off the grid for many, many years trying to come over the McLaurys.
Eventually he opened his own O.K. corral, an organic chicken farm, finally finding his peace and happiness where he’s been living happily ever after.
End of Part I. The Quest for McDonald continues…