I heard an interview with Morgan Spurlock on NPR when his crdocumentary on McDonald's came out, and thought him a fool as a result. The basis of the movie (as I understand it, based on the interview--I haven't actually seen it) was that fast food was bad for you. He apparently, and admittedly demonstrated this by ordering the worst possible things from the McDonalds menu for weeks on end, and foregoing exercise. I leave the illogic of his thesis, and means of proving it, to the reader.

Now we find out that he's been giving insulting and obscene speeches to high-school students, including making fun of the special ed students. His "apology" is pathetic, as many of his commenters note.

[Via Joanne Jacobs, whose important new book on education you should purchase this week, to help make her birthday on Friday a happier one]

"His "apology" is pathetic, as many of his commenters note."

This appeared in AP and AP is a mainstream media source, right? So why should we believe anything they say?

Yeah Rand, above we have an example of a pathetic comment, so what's not the say the other commenters were not pathetic.

yeah, probably hes just bitter cause he messed up his liver or whatever to prove something everyone knew already. its like if you were gonna try and prove gravity by jumping off a skyscraper.

I was of a similar opinion myself until the movie was on TV on an evening when I could be bothered to watch it. Actually, it's not how you represent it here.

The basis of the movie came from a statement by the CEO of McDonalds (the one, I think who died of the MI) that their food could be eaten all the time with no effect on health. So, while everybody assumes it is bad for you, the thesis the movie put out was what effect would it have on somebody who lived the "average" American lifestyle in terms of exercise and so on.

Spurlock had a full medical to start and was in good shape and had continued assessments through the event. A bunch of rules were set down about what he had to eat through the day and he wore a pedometer to ensure he walked the average amount daily by an average American.

At the outset the Doctors were of the opinion that it probably wasn't actually going to do him much harm - they changed their minds around the end of week 2 which is when he should have stopped. Of course, he'd not have had much of a movie then.

He tried switching to salads and so on but found that as they were back then, these were actually worse for you than some of the burgers.

The movie is preachy in places but the analysis is actually quite interesting.

Spurlock is the new Michael Moore. He took a statement from the McD's CEO completely out of context and made a movie. It's a silly, stupid concept. No one at McDonalds ever thought someone would eat 90 straight meals at the drive thru window. They'd all be doing hand stands at the home office if even 1% of us did that.

McDonalds does have salads and I don't remember him eating even one. How many of their patrons super sizes EVERY meal and also has 2 quarter pounders? His intake of calories alone from his usual vegetarian / vegan lifestyle would cause some of the problems he had.

Spurlock, like Moore, has an agenda. America is a bad, and evil, over indulgent country. We don't deserve to exist and big money, big name corporations are the root of all evil. CEOs all lie and we shouldn't believe anyone in charge.

And he shows us that by becoming rich and famous and getting nominated for an Academy Award and by winning fame and fortune around the world.

So if he is now one of the rich and powerful, doesn't that mean he is one of the bad guys?

Steve and Daveon you might wanna recap the movie and get back on this. Part of the rules imposed were that he would only supersize if the McD's associate would offer the option to super size his meal. Also, the movie did show him eating a salad, once. Another rule was that he had to eat everything off the menu at least once. Predominantly, the movie showed him eating nothing but burgers and fries. It did show him drinking the bottled water that McD's sells quite a bit but mostly it looked like he was drinking soda.

The point of the experiment was that he was trying to mimic a large segment of the population that eat out for fast food dinner most of the time. Not necessarily a segment of the population that subsist on nothing but McDonald's specifically but that just eat fast food in general. Also, there is a large percentage of people that will continue to eat high caloric fat, simple sugar laden, and highly processed foods despite the directions not to by their doctors. So, he didn't seem to respond to much of anything the doctors told him to do in the movie just like a large number of people do. The majority of complications that arise from adult onset diabetes are the result of patient non-compliance.

I think he also tried to put the message out that the corporate food service people are really only giving people what they want. I mean they make a big gulp the size of a 2 liter and guess what, people buy it -- supply and demand.

There is a part where he does get a tad unamerican in his message when he gets the foreign lady on their to explain that over in Europe they have sensible sizes to choose from while pigs here in America need drinks the size of a human skull. In fact if they offered a human skull to drink from hell I'd order that! We could very easily make a movie for the Europeans called 'Lassen Sie uns vergeudet erhalten' and try to examine what exactly is their fascination with being completely inebriated all the time.