Sunday, March 06, 2005

Eating Fries to Go Down a Size?

An Edmonton biology teacher, Les Sayer just finished a month-long McDonald's diet, which coupled with exercise helped him lose 17 pounds. He did this in reaction to Morgan Spurlock's rambunctious documentary, "Super Size Me," which he says "centred around an anti-corporate theme." (Such bad English for a teacher: "centred around"?)

Seems to me, however, that Sayer just wanted to advance an agenda of his own.

Two things:

Spurlock explicitly says he's not picking on McDonald's alone and that he coulda done the same thing with another restaurant.

Secondly, he didn't simply ignore the important factor of exercise at all. He explicitly says he's going to adjust his exercise *down* to represent the exercise of the average American. He takes a taxi to McD's at one point because, living in NYC, he's walking too much compared to the average American. So he's not just picking on big corporations, as Sayer indicates, he criticizing the American diet at large (no pun intended), as well as the corporations, which cater to it.

I'm sure the documentary isn't 100% accurate, and it may be biased against big corporate food groups, but the teacher seems to be misrepresenting Spurlock in order to defend a corporation himself. (Maybe he should be a business teacher, instead of a biology teacher?)

Besides you can gain or lose weight eating *anything* as long as you eat it in the right amounts and exercise--as Jared Fogle and Subway had to admit. I could embark on an M&Ms diet and lose weight, but that wouldn't mean M&Ms were good for me or say anthing about Mars as a corporate entity.

(Via Bo Cowgill)

No comments: