Memes

The point everyone forgets—and was the whole point of the name of his documentary—was that he wasn’t just eating every meal at McDonalds but had to Super Size the meal if asked. At the time it was the policy of McD’s to try to get people to Super Size their meals. So he was regularly adding hundreds of extra calories to most meals.

He was trying to be provocative and sell his art. Someone else could have eaten at McDonalds every meal at the same time and stayed near a 2k calorie diet. Definitely not something i would want to do but it wouldn’t be worse than some peoples daily meals. That wasn’t the goal of the documentary though; the goal was to spur public discourse about the high calorie foods being served by places like McD’s and their policies of encouraging larger portion sizes.

The documentary was effective and definitely caused public discourse and fast food menus to change. Even though it was largely based on a very controlled and manipulative narrative that Spurlock spun.