I finally got to see Supersize Me, that “McDonalds makes you fat” documentary, over the weekend.

I thought it was pretty good, but not as influential/shocking as I had expected. For one thing, I’ve never thought that McDonald-class food was healthy in any way, and I guess I don’t expect anyone else to think so either. So, the idea of eating at MickeyDee’s three times a day is sort of equivalent to eating any unhealthy junk food three times a day. I guess I look at fast food joints as being a “last resort”, a place to go when I can’t get a real meal, but hunger demands I eat something.

In fact, the most shocking part of the movie to me was the “food decomposition test”, which was a bonus feature. In this test, several burgers and fries from McDonalds were put in glass jars along with burgers and fries from a real joint. After 8 weeks, all the foods had (grossly) decomposed, except the McDonald’s french fries, which still looked brand new. That was freaky.

The second most disturbing part was the whole school lunch thing. You can’t expect children to make informed and reasonable decisions, especially on non-short term issues like healty eating. So, a school that allows 2 candy bars, chips and a soda to be a lunch is just negligent. No two ways about it - that’s just selling out children to the corporate interests.

The rest of the movie was basically a commentary on how fat and lazy Americans are, which is no surprise to anyone who bothers to look. America is in a sad state of decline in just about every way, and being fat and lazy is just one combination symptom/contributing factor to the problem.

That being said, the movie was still very much worth watching, and the DVD extras were nice additions - in some places better than what actually made it into the film.