April 3, 2025 • 55 mins
We're sharing an episode from the Sporkful podcast. In 2004, Morgan Spurlock released his low-budget documentary Super Size Me, and achieved success that most documentary filmmakers can only dream about. The film made millions at the box office, it was nominated for an Academy Award, and it turned Morgan into a star. To this day, the film is still shown in middle school and high school health classes across the country. But in 2017, Morgan made a shocking confession that derailed his career and called into question Super Size Me’s original claims. Last year, weeks after the film’s twentieth anniversary, Morgan died of cancer. The Sporkful looked into the legacy of Super Size Me. Sporkul senior producer Andres O’Hara talks with some of the people closest to Morgan to figure out: Who really was Morgan Spurlock? How did Super Size Me become such a huge hit? And after all these years, should we still be showing it to kids? Listen and Follow The Sporkful wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hello, Hello, Malcolm Glabo here, it's been a busy season
Revisionist History. Coming up next week, we're bringing you an
argument on the American Siren. Do they even save time
when it comes to reaching emergencies? And what if we
didn't have them at all? That's next week. Today, we're
excited to show an episode from the podcast The Sporkful,
hosted by Dan Pashman. The Sporkful is not for foodies,
(00:42):
it's for eaters, and every week they obsess about food
to learn more about people, which is actually something we'll
be exploring in a few weeks on Revisionist History with
a special episode on the beloved nooks and crannies of
Thomas's English Muffins. Stay tuned for that. But this episode
of The Sporkful looks at the legacy of the documentary
(01:04):
Supersized Me. The film started as a stunt what would
Happen if Morgan's Adoni McDonald's for thirty Days? But this
slow budget film became a nationwide hit and turned Morgan
into a household name. Years later, at the peak of
his career, Morgan published a confession that tanked his career
and called into question the results of the film. So
(01:27):
what was really going on in Supersized Me? And why
after all these years is it still being shown in schools.
Here's Dan Pashman.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Please note this episode contains references to sexual abuse and
disordered eating. All right, let's make some authentic sound effects here.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Mine's going to become a man right now. It's a
little baby, a little baby in a can and then.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Oh man, fully sound effects. Eat your heart out.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
We got a second career.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Ten years ago I interviewed the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.
At the time, in his Twitter bio, he called himself
a Guinness drinking West Virginia hillbilly. So I thought, let's
chat over some Guinness. Imagine if your whole job was
just to open and drink beer to make sound.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Effects, how do I get that job?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
But Morgan wasn't there just to talk about Guinness. He
was promoting his new Showtime series Seven Deadly Sins. Each
episode was a story about a person who embodies one
of those sins. The show leaned heavily on extremes like
extreme eating and the extreme ways people treat their bodies.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Her goal was to become the fattest person in the
world like she wanted to break the Guinness Book a
world record, and then once she hit six hundred and
some pounds, somewhere in there she had this like elevated
sexuality within her body that she just wanted to explore
and enjoy.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I couldn't help but see the link between this project
and Morgan's most famous film, Supersize Me. It's a documentary
where Morgan himself goes to extremes, eating nothing but McDonald's
for thirty days and monitoring how it affects his body.
Morgan told me that for him, these extremes have a purpose.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
I'm more interested in people thinking about the choices that
we make, and you know, through something that is I
think shocking or offensive.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Supersize Me came out twenty years ago. When Morgan Spurlock
released it, he achieved a status that most documentary filmmakers
can only dream about. The film made millions at the
box office, it was nominated for an Academy Award, and
it turned Morgan into a star. And to this day,
the film is still shown in middle school and high
school health classes across America. Morgan went on to make
more documentaries. It seemed like for a time he was
(03:35):
taking on some of the biggest cultural and social issues
in this country. Then one of the biggest cultural issues
in America caught up with him when he made a
shocking confession at the height of the Me Too movement.
Part of that confession also had an impact on Supersize Me,
calling into question how real key parts of the film
actually were. This past May, Morgan died of cancer. He
(03:55):
was fifty three. Almost no one knew he was sick,
and his death revealed just how much he had disappeared
from public life since his confession. Today on the show,
we're asking who really was Morgan Spurlock, What was it
about Supersize Me that made it such a huge and
after all these years, should we still be showing it
to kids? This is the sport fall. It's not for foodies,
(04:18):
it's for eaters.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
I'm Dan Pashman.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to
learn more about people. Today, we're bringing you the inside
story of Supersize Me and a look at the film's
legacy today. Because it's a pretty epic and complicated story,
our senior producer Andre Sohara looked into it.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
I'm going to tell you the story of Supersize Me
in five chapters. We'll start with chapter one, the prologue.
This chapter starts in a farmhouse outside of Portland, Oregon,
in the nineteen seventies. That's where Alex Jamison grew up.
Her parents were, in her words, back to the land hippies.
Speaker 6 (04:51):
My mom had an organic gardening radio show for a decade.
It was called Eves Organic Garden, And once a year
I would go on the show and do a children's
gardening corner and talk about growing strawberries or butterfly pollinating plants.
Thanks like that.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Alex's family would harvest vegetables from the garden and barter
for chickens and local honey from their neighbors. But eventually
Alex went away for college and she ate like a
lot of college students, plenty of junk food and sweets,
not a whole lot of veggies. And she continued eating
that way in her early twenties when she moved to
New York and got her first big job.
Speaker 6 (05:28):
So I was a legal assistant and it was just
grueling work, and the first time I'd ever had to
sit down artificial lighting ten to twelve hour days, and
I just started eating more sugar, more caffeine to get
through the day, and I started getting horrible migraines.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Doctors prescribed painkillers and antidepressants, but she didn't want to
go down that path.
Speaker 6 (05:50):
So I found another doctor that you had a Buddha
and ferns in his office, and she actually asked me
like what I was eating.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
This doctor suggested that Alex make some changes to her diet.
And when Alex got this advice, it was her light
bulb moment, the idea that what you eat can affect
your health in all kinds of different ways. So she
went to the library and dove into books about health
and nutrition. This was in the nineties, pre Google. Within
a few weeks, she radically changed her diet. She went vegan,
(06:21):
and then she went further.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
Took everything out gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, caffeine. First week
was horrible. You feel worse before you feel better.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Six months after making these changes, Alex left her job
at the law firm and enrolled at the Natural Gourmet Institute,
a cooking school in New York. At night, she worked
as a cocktail waitress. One night, while working at the bar,
she met a guy named Morgan Spurlock, and they started flirting.
The next week, he came to the bar when Alex's
shift ended at four am, and he took her out
(06:54):
to breakfast. They started dating and Alex began learning about
Morgan's life. Morgan grew up in Beckley, West Virginia. His
mother was a public school teacher and his dad owned
a tool machine shop. Morgan was the youngest of three boys.
Speaker 6 (07:06):
And he and his older brothers growing up in Beckley
were all ballet dancers. His eldest brother, Craig, actually went professional.
I just think it's so cool that their parents were
supportive of that to be ballerinos. Yeah, and you know,
Morgan also really got into student government. I mean, the
(07:28):
most energetic person on the planet.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
At the time. Morgan had two very different ideas about
what he wanted to do with his life. One idea
came from that student government side. He wanted to go
to West Point and join the army and then become
a politician. But Morgan didn't get into West Point, so
he pursued a second idea, acting. He ended up at
the film program at New York University. After graduating, he
(07:52):
pursued acting for a few years, but it wasn't really
working out, so he opened his own production company. This
is when he and Alex started dating. He was thirty
and she was twenty five.
Speaker 6 (08:02):
I was like, so, what do you do for a living.
He's like, I'm a producer and I was like, what
does that mean. He's like, I make things happen. I
was like, oh my god, please never say that to
anyone ever again. That's disgusting. And he thought that was hilarious.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
One of his projects was an online video series called
I Bet You Will.
Speaker 6 (08:20):
He would say this himself. He's like, it was just
the dumbest ideas. It's what you would do in high
school with your friends, like I'll give you five dollars
if you'll eat you know, three sandwiches in less than
five minutes, you know, just betting people to do stupid
stuff for money.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Getting people to do stupid stuff for money. It wasn't
exactly a new concept, but it was a hot idea
at the time, and the show got acquired by MTV.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
He got a bigger budget, going down to the Jersey
shore for spring break and crowds of teenagers, you know,
betting each other to do things. It was ridiculous.
Speaker 7 (08:54):
I will pay you one hundred dollars cash to stuff
this entire pizza into your pants.
Speaker 8 (09:00):
Are you ready?
Speaker 7 (09:00):
Yeah, she's gonna go for I will give you four
hundred dollars cash to put on the I Bet you
will phone, you will jump rope while we spray you
with milk. Right here, we have I Bet you owe
meal worms over a night, right, and of course the
world famous I Bet you will Madagascar hitt and cockroaches.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah, in that last one, he's challenging a contestant to
put cockroaches and meal worms down her pants. Do you
think at the time, like, was he happy? Was he
excited about this?
Speaker 8 (09:32):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (09:32):
He was over the moon. He was so excited. At
the same time, he was broke. We were both broke.
He loved that I was in culinary school because I
would bring all leftovers from school and feed the office.
And he was actually living in the office at that
point because he couldn't afford an apartment for at least
a year.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I think Morgan had discovered that even though he was
gaining success with his MTV show, it wasn't really paying
the bills.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
He was like paying employees with credit cards. He was
like going and doing like man with a van jobs
on Craigslist. He would work a full day in the
production office and then go, you know, lift shit for
other people for like forty bucks, just so he could
like buy Metro cards for his staff, like he really
really was the hardest worker.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
After two seasons, I Bet You Will didn't get renewed,
but Morgan had made some money from the show and
he had to figure out what to do next. He
was in a lot of debt at the time, somewhere
between sixty and seventy thousand dollars, so one option would
be to use that money to pay down that debt. Instead,
he decided to ignore it for a little while longer
and find his next project, Chapter two, The Idea. In
(10:49):
two thousand and two, Morgan and Alex were in West
Virginia for Thanksgiving with Morgan's family.
Speaker 6 (10:54):
We were on his mom's couch and we were watching
the news and there was the story about two teenage
girls in New York City who were suing McDonald's.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
The two girls, who lived in the Bronx were suing
McDonald's for damages related to obesity. They argued that McDonald's
was responsible for their adverse health outcomes because it didn't
tell customers about the health risks of its food. As
the new story continued, a spokesperson for McDonald's came on.
He said that you can't link McDonald's to obesity at all,
because their food was healthy and nutritious.
Speaker 6 (11:27):
And he was like, well, what would happen if I
just ate nothing about McDonald's for a month? And I
was like, please don't do that. And he's like, wait
a minute, that's a great Like that's literally what happened.
We had a fight on the couch and I was like,
please don't do this, And so.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Were you thinking of all the people I could have met?
Speaker 6 (11:46):
Well, you know, I was in love with him, and
he was a goofball. And Morgan's attitude was well, if
I feel like crap, it'll be a good movie, and
if nothing happens to me, it'll be a great advertisement
for McDonald's and I'll see if they want to buy it.
And I was like, oh my god, dude, Okay, go ahead,
(12:07):
and he was off.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Morgan got to work. The film starts off with Morgan
consulting with three doctors to get a baseline of his health.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
Your blood tests are excellent, your blood level's fine, your
iron level is good as well.
Speaker 9 (12:26):
You have no evileness or diabet. This your fostering, but
sugars very low.
Speaker 10 (12:29):
Your kidney function, your liver function, they were all perfect.
Speaker 7 (12:33):
You don't smoke, I used to.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I don't any drug use at all, not for a
long time. Any alcohol use now none.
Speaker 9 (12:40):
Is there anything that we didn't cover? Is anything else
you need to tell me?
Speaker 5 (12:43):
Yeah, I don't think so.
Speaker 9 (12:45):
Patient is embarking on a one month McDonald's binge.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
As he sets off, Morgan creates rules for this experiment.
He has to adopt the lifestyle of an average American,
so he stops exercising, and he even cuts back on
the amount that he walks. He'll only consume food and
drink Solda McDonald's, nothing else, And if he's asked if
he wants to supersize him, he has to say yes.
The whole thing. It feels sort of scientific with the
(13:13):
rules and the doctors and the blood tests. But you
also see the Morgan if I bet you will the
one who wants to go to extremes and have a
lot of fun doing it.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
Yeah, could I get the double quarter pounder with cheese meal?
Speaker 4 (13:30):
I think I'm gonna have to go supersize.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
On day two, Morgan gets his first supersize meal and
he is pumped.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Look at that.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Look at how big that thing is. Look at how
big that French fry is. But then as he starts eating,
Morgan's enthusiasm drops.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
But I'm just not even I'm not even halfway done
with those fries.
Speaker 9 (13:49):
I'm in half way.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Five minutes goes by, and then ten as he's pushing
himself to finish the whole meal.
Speaker 11 (13:56):
Oh, let's give me a minute.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
He's in his car eating in the McDonald's parking lot,
and suddenly he leans out the window and pukes. The
camera then goes over his shoulder and you can see
the mess that Morgan's meet on the pavement. But Morgan
doesn't quit. After day three, his body seems to adapt
to his new diet and he's putting away McDonald's much
(14:21):
more easily. Day five is his first weigh in with
his dieticians. He started out weighing one hundred and eighty
five pounds.
Speaker 11 (14:28):
We had to stop everything.
Speaker 8 (14:29):
I don't believe it.
Speaker 7 (14:30):
One hundred and ninety five pounds pay.
Speaker 11 (14:32):
He camped that we have to redo this.
Speaker 6 (14:34):
You're in a gain to actually about five percent of your
body weight. Losing weight that fast and gaining weight that
fast is not healthy.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
After ten days, Morgan's gained nearly ten percent of his
bodyweight seventeen pounds. He's also getting headaches, feeling depressed, and
sluggish at times. He's eating five thousand calories a day.
Speaker 7 (14:53):
I officially had to loosen my belt the other day
from I had to lego a notch lower, not one notch.
Speaker 6 (15:00):
Girlfriend Loving you.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Morgan's girlfriend, of course, is Alex, who you've been hearing from.
She's introduced as Morgan's girlfriend and vegan chef, but she
also worked with Morgan behind the scenes on the film.
Alex connected Morgan with nutrition experts and got Morgan to
look into school lunch programs for the film. In one
notable scene, she appears on camera to talk about what
Morgan's supersized diet has been like for her.
Speaker 12 (15:24):
It's hard for me to watch him go through this.
He's exhausted by the end of the day, just so tired,
gets home really late from work, and you know, he
gets all jacked up on sugar and caffeine and then
he crashes and then when we too have sex. I
gotta tell you he's not quite as energetic as.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
He used to be.
Speaker 11 (15:48):
I have to be on top.
Speaker 12 (15:50):
Otherwise he uh, you know, he gets tired easily. I
think the saturated fats are starting to impede the blood
flow to his penis.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
I didn't know if anybody was going to see this.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Alex told me that in the decades since the film
came out, she's been asked about that scene a lot.
Speaker 6 (16:11):
If I had known I'd be sitting next to my
grandmother in a movie theater watching this scene, I wouldn't
have said it, but I'm glad I did.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Alex believed in the message of the film, even if
she had always loved Morgan's tactics. At the time, she
was working as a personal chef, and some of her
clients were people dealing with serious illnesses. For Alex, this
scene showed how a poor diet can affect all parts
of your life, not just the most obvious ones. Anyway,
up to this point in the film, Morgan's powering through
and it seems like he's having fun. But about two
(16:41):
weeks in things take a turn for the worse.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
It's like two in the morning.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I yeah, I woke up.
Speaker 10 (16:48):
I couldn't breathe.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
It felt like I was having a heart palpitations.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
He sees one of his doctors who doesn't really know
why Morgan is experiencing these symptoms. The doctor seems worried.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
If it pays starts to radiate to Joe down your arm,
that's life threatening and immediately. So yeah, so I need
to hear about that, or you need to go on
line one.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Okay, Morgan gets his full blood work done again. His
cholesterol and his body fat are way up. But it's
worse than that.
Speaker 9 (17:16):
Okay, for the first time, we see uric acid elevators.
So you're giving yourself hyper urysmia, and the danger of
hyperurysmia is gout kidney stones. The results for your liver
are obscene, beyond anything I would have thought. You're sick,
and you're making yourself sick, and then you can make
yourself unsick by stopping doing what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Suddenly, this fun goofy stunt gets very serious and you
can see Morgan right in the middle of this experiment,
reckon with the fact that he might have done some
real damage to his body, and he doesn't know what's
going to happen if he keeps going.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
I'm terrified, like, dude, stop, you've proven your point, you've
done it. Please stop, like it's gotten so bad so quickly.
Imagine what another two weeks will do to you. And
he loved to tell this story about how he called
all his friends and he talked to all the doctors
and me, and everybody is saying stop. They talked to Craig,
who is one of my favorite people on earth, his
(18:12):
oldest brother, Craig. Craig is like, Morgan, people eat this
crap their whole lives. I think another two weeks is
going to kill you. And where He's like, great, I'm
gonna keep going.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
And spoiler alert, I guess Morgan survives. He keeps up
his McDonald's diet, and he goes back to the dieticians
for one final way in. At the end of the
thirty days, he marches to the scale wearing only a
tiny speedo with an image of the American flag on it.
Speaker 12 (18:37):
Woo okay, oh yeah, oh boy, say two to.
Speaker 9 (18:46):
Ten right on the money.
Speaker 7 (18:48):
And only thirty days of eating nothing but McDonald's, I
gained twenty four and a half pounds, My liver turned
to fat, and my cholesterol shot up. Sixty five points.
My body fat percentage went from eleven to eighteen percent.
I nearly doubled my risk of coronary heart disease, making
myself twice as likely to have heart failure.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
I filed there.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
The movie ends with Alex taking control. She puts Morgan
on a vegan high fiber diet. After six weeks, his
cholesterol and liver functions go back to normal. It then
takes him five months to lose twenty pounds. Chapter three
a Supersized Success. Morgan finished the film at the end
(19:29):
of two thousand and three, and then things started happening
very quickly. Supersized Me was selected for the Sundance Film Festival,
so Morgan and Alex flew up to Utah for the premiere.
The screen room was packed, and then the movie started playing.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
There's like Morgan talking to the camera like I'm ready
Supersize Me, and then the Queen Song starts right Fat
Bottom Girls was opening the movie, and like the crowd
erupted into applause and cheers, and I was like, that's
not normal, that's not normal. This is Sundance. And Morgan
(20:04):
and I were standing room only. We were in the
back of the theater. We ran out to the lobby
and we were just like, oh my, oh God, like
people might actually like this, Like I think this is
gonna happen.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Morgan when the Documentary Directing Award at Sundance, and just
like that, it seemed like everybody wanted this film.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
And then we went to over twenty countries in the
next year, going to film festivals around the world, and
the first and only time I ever flew first class,
like we got put in the best hotels. We went
to Australia for like three different film festivals. I mean,
I can never go back to Australia because I flew
(20:42):
their first class and I think that's probably a really
rough trip if you're not in the big, fancy seats.
So it was just it was just really fun. It
was an amazing opportunity.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Supersize Me, which had a sixty five thousand dollars budget,
grossed twenty two million dollars. It was a huge figure
for a documentary. It was even nominated for an Oscar.
Morgan's Burlock became a household name and the film became
sort of a shorthand even if you didn't see it,
you knew the gist.
Speaker 13 (21:07):
Of it.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
This guy ate nothing but mcdone for a month and
he got really sick. Six weeks after the film was released,
McDonald's discontinued its super Size menu. The company said that
at the time, the film didn't affect their decision. Alex
was also getting a lot of attention. She set up
a website and posted some of the recipes that were
featured in the movie. Once the film came out, she
received thousands of messages from people who wanted her advice
(21:30):
on health and nutrition.
Speaker 6 (21:31):
And we were just both really honored and excited that
I was getting to talk about food and health with
people all around the world, and he was getting to
do film and TV. We both got book deals out
of it. Morgan's next project got greenlit to do another
show like it. Just so much was happening so quickly.
(21:52):
I was like, Wow, I guess I should start a
health coaching business. Okay, So that was the next ten
years for me. So it was Yeah, it was a
happy time.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Well, Morgan was at Sundance celebrating his success. Across the country.
In Washington, DC, Sean Lawton was looking for his next
big client. Sean was a speaking agent. He booked speakers
for universities. That was his market.
Speaker 13 (22:19):
My buyers are eighteen to twenty two year olds who
somehow are in charge of enormous amounts of money, and
they get to decide who comes to their school. Around
two thousand and two, two thousand and three, we started
to see Michael Moore and Eric Schlosser. Those guys just
got booked everywhere.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Eric Schlosser was the author of Fast Food Nation, The
Dark Side of the All American Meal. It came out
in two thousand and one. The next year, Michael Moore
released his hit documentary book Gun Violence Bowling for Columbine.
Speaker 13 (22:50):
I mean, they were doing universities everywhere you turned. The
problem was I didn't represent either one of those. And
so you're like, Okay, I'm going to find the next thing.
And my then girlfriend showed me a news article and said, hey,
read this. And it was just a short blurb about
supersized me and the reception that it got. And I
read it and I'm like, oh my god, Michael Moore
(23:12):
and Eric Slusher had a love child, and that is
going to be my next speaker. And I came into
the office that day and I told my assistant, I said,
you have one job today, find me Morgan Spurlock.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Sean got Morgan on the phone while he was still
at sun Dance. A week later, Sean signed Morgan as
his client and got to work booking him at universities.
Speaker 13 (23:32):
I'm booking him. I haven't met him. I haven't seen
the movie. So it's a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
You booked him without meeting him and without seeing the movie? Yes,
what made you feel like I can actually take the
risk and book this guy without having met him and
without seeing the thing that everyone's talking about?
Speaker 13 (23:51):
It was just it was an irresistible hook man each
thirty days of McDonald's and lives to talk about it. Truthfully,
the movie's success was somewhat irrelevant because it wasn't the movie. Ultimately,
it was Morgan because he was this bigger than life personality.
He was such a confident guy and I was a
little arrogant myself. So we were, you know, a pretty
(24:13):
brash duo going out there and saying, Hey, this is
going to be the thing you need to bring to
your campus. And within our first year, our first twelve months,
we booked seventy two speaking engagements at universities, These.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Talks were lucrative for Morgan. In two thousand and four,
his fee started at seventy five hundred dollars per talk.
The next year that feed doubled. Morgan spoken packed campus
auditoriums across the country about the Supersize Me story, and
after his first year on the road, more and more
schools wanted him.
Speaker 13 (24:41):
What was really surprising to me was the staying power
of Supersize Me. Okay, here's a movie that comes out
in two thousand and four, it's on home video. By
you know, two thousand and six, two thousand and seven,
you would think, Okay, that movie has had its run.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Morgan had also moved on. In two thousand and five,
he launched the series Thirty Days on FX, where he
attempted to live a totally different life for a month.
In two thousand and eight, he got a little more
ambitious and made a film where he tried to track
down a sol'ma bin laden. But Sean says, wherever Morgan
went to speak, everyone wanted to hear about Supersize Me.
Sean and Morgan knew how to capitalize on that interest,
(25:18):
even in places where the film might have gotten them
in a little trouble.
Speaker 13 (25:21):
I remember getting contracts from especially from some religious schools
that would you know, have morality clauses in them about
the language, and you know, if the morality clauses were breached,
they wouldn't pay. First thing I thought was, Okay, we've
got a scene here with Morgan's naked buttocks, and we've
got a couple of f words. Southern Methodist University might
(25:45):
not be ready for this next thing. You know, Morgan
had a family friendly cut of the movie made that
he could take out to schools with religious affiliations or
eventually high schools and secondary schools.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Creating this PG version of the film was a crucial
decision that helps explain the film's staying power and how
it ended up being taught in health classes across the
country to this day. At the time, Morgan was also
being asked to speak in middle schools in high schools,
and when he gave these talks, he brought a copy
of this school friendly version of Supersize Me. He mostly
got positive, encouraging responses from parents and teachers, but not always.
Speaker 13 (26:19):
I remember vividly a woman standing up and she was like,
I appreciate you coming here. I loved the movie. I
loved your story. I'm a single mom. I've got three kids,
child supports not cutting it. You know, I got to
work these jobs. I got to you know, I have
childcare in limited capacity. What am I supposed to do?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
The mother said that she often picked up McDonald's for
her kids. It was a fast and inexpensive way to
get dinner on the table. And now here's this film
telling her that this is actually a terrible choice.
Speaker 13 (26:50):
And that was one of the few times Morgan didn't
have a good comeback, And that was one of the
things that I think kind of stuck with him through
the Supersize Me cycle is okay, here I did open
Pandora's box, you know now what? And I think one
of the things that he was going to eventually try
to unravel was supersize Me too, which was what would
it look like if we reinvented the fast food model?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Coming up thirteen years after the premiere Supersized Me, Morgan
launches his next big project, a sequel, But just as
the film is about to be released, he does something
that brings his whole career crashing down. Stick around.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
All right back to the show. Senior producer Andre Sohara
picks it up from here.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Okay on the chapter four part of the problem. In
the years after Morgan's Barlock released Supersized Me, while Morgan
was touring the country talking about US film and making
other documentaries, fast food companies went on a marketing blitz
to convince the public that their food was fresher, cleaner,
and healthier, and in fact, some of those companies wanted
to recruit Morgan in their campaigns. In twenty sixteen, an
(28:04):
ad agency reached out to him. The idea was to
create a fake documentary where he investigate It's Hearty's and
Carls Junior and then discovers, to his utmost surprise, that
they're actually really healthy. Morgan never took the job, but
that pitch gave him his next big idea. What if
he started his own fast food restaurant. That's the premise
of Supersize Me Too, Holy Chicken. Morgan sets out to
(28:25):
create a fast food restaurant in Columbus, Ohio called Holy
Chicken to see if he can make fast food that's
actually good for you. He decides to raise his own
chickens for the restaurant, but when he does that, he
confronts the dark world of factory farming, where animals bread
from meat are getting sick and dropping dead, and small
farmers who are deeply in debt to giant meat companies
are terrified speaking out. The film has Morgan Spurlock's special sauce.
(28:48):
It's gruesome and infuriating while still being funny and captivating.
Supersize Me, Too premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in
September of twenty seventeen, where was acquired by YouTube for
a three point five million dollars. The film was set
to be released in theaters in early twenty eighteen. Morgan
was still working with Sean Lawton, his speaking agent, and
they had big plans for the release.
Speaker 13 (29:08):
I was excited about, you know, going back and you
know a little bit like getting the band back together.
You know, I was going to be taking this out
to colleges who don't even remember this first Supersize Me.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Sean was also making big changes in his own life.
After working at the same place for twenty years, Sean
made the jump to a new agency in Colorado, which
would be a big step up for him. He'd be
taking his clients with him, and Morgan was a big
draw for this new agency. Sean and his wife had
just had a baby, and now they were moving across
the country to start a new life in Colorado.
Speaker 13 (29:37):
With the movie on the horizon. You know, Morgan was
in a really good place. I was in a really
good place. There was a lot of excitement. We were both,
you know, somewhat giddy about what the future held.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
In December of twenty seventeen, Sean had finished his move
to Colorado and jumped on a flight back east for
the holidays.
Speaker 13 (29:54):
And I was on the plane and I landed at
Reagan Airport, and as soon as I turned my phone on,
my notifications lit up in a way that I don't
know that I've ever seen them before or since. I mean,
I knew something was wrong. I thought something terrible had
happened to my family. But then as I started opening
emails and text messages, it was journalists and they were
all like, do you have a comment on the Morgan
(30:15):
Spurlock story. And I was like, uh, oh, what's the
Morgan Spurlock story.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
At the height of me too, Morgan had written a
letter and posted it online. It was titled I Am
Part of the Problem. In it, he describes an experience
in college where he had a one night stand with
a woman, one that she later described as rape. He
confessed to paying a settlement to another woman who worked
for his company for sexual harassment. He admitted to infidelity
and belittling and demeaning women in his office. He said
(30:44):
he'd been an alcoholic for decades and that alcohol had
been a way to cope with his depression, and he
also said that he'd been sexually abused as a child.
Near the end of the letter, he writes, quote, I
am part of the problem. We all are, but I
am also part of the solution. By recognizing and openly
admitting what I've done to further this terrible situation, I
hope to empower the change within myself. We should all
(31:06):
find the courage to admit we're at fault.
Speaker 13 (31:09):
I remember thinking this is really bad. This is not
going to go well. So the first thing I did,
I hadn't even gotten home yet. I called Morgan and
he was not himself, and I think he was just
starting to come to grips with the fact of what
he had done, and it was very clear that the
reaction he was expecting was not the reaction he got.
(31:32):
Morgan was a very thoughtful, funny, organized guy. He told
stories that felt very organic, but they were very well sculpted.
And this was a meandering, poorly written diatribe that conflated
things that had nothing to do with the other thing.
And it was just a mess. And the first thing
(31:54):
I thought was he was probably under the influence when
he wrote this, and I don't think he had any
idea what was about to happen. Literally the day that
he posted that, every business partner, every client, every brand deal,
everybody left. I mean it was rapid, it was sudden,
it was complete. I mean he did not have many
people left in his orbit.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
YouTube pulled out of the deal for Supersize Me Too,
The film was dropped from Sundance, and Morgan stepped down
from his production company, Warrior Poets. Five days later, Jezebel
published a story about the culture at Warrior Poets. Seven
women who are former employees described a freddy boys club
culture where nude paintings were hung on the wall, alcohol
was pushed on employees, and women were frequently commented on
(32:38):
based on their looks. Sean Lawton had to drop Morgan
as a client.
Speaker 13 (32:42):
And I remember calling the head of the agency that
I just moved to, and I said, hey, I got
some news, and I remember it was the first time
that I realized that I was in a lot of trouble.
A few months into that relationship, they did terminate my contract.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
After Morgan published his letter, he briefly checked into a
rehab facility. A month later, Sean was in New York
and wanted to meet with Morgan for the first time
since they parted ways.
Speaker 13 (33:06):
I texted and I said, hey, let's meet. It a
die airless talk, and I remember he came in and
it was like looking at a ghost. You know, it
was the first time I've seen him clean shaven, you know,
the trade bark mustache was gone. You know, his hair
was thinning, he the eyes were sunken. He just looked
like somebody who was still in shock. Even after I
(33:28):
guess that point had probably been about six weeks. I
talked a lot about his sobriety and how important that
was to him, And even then I was trying to
let him know that, you know, this is not going
to be easy. I can't speak to you know, the
experience of his victims, and and I think that should
be the first thought. And I think one of the
(33:48):
things that you know, in our later years and later
conversations that always rubbed him the wrong way is there
were people who didn't ever apologize, they didn't take ownership
of it, and they didn't wind up getting canceled. They
still got endorsements, they still got to do deals, they
still got to be out in the public, and he
never got that opportunity. And he felt like, but I confessed,
I apologized, why didn't I get the same grace? He
(34:11):
was always looking for that fast forward button. It's like,
how do we skip this part? And I'm like, you
can't skip this part. I said, you're going to have
to go through this and you don't get to decide
how long that's going to take. And that was the
one thing that you know, we probably had maybe three
or four conversations over the years after that, and you know,
every time it always started with, Hey, can you bring
me back as a client? You know, I really want
to go out there and I want to do speaking again,
(34:32):
and you know, I really love it, and I'm like, look,
you're one of the best speakers I've ever worked with.
You've been a great friend, you were a huge part
of my early career. You put me on the map
as a speaking agent. But I mean, we don't live
in a world right now where we can just act
like this didn't happen. I mean, you confess to some
bad things. And he was like, what else do I
have to do? And I'm like, that's not for me
to decide. But you have not healed yourself enough to
(34:55):
be able to go out and resume your work. And
that was the one thing that I just don't know
if it ever got through to him.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Morgan's confession didn't just topple his career, it also into
question his most famous work, Supersize Me. That's because in
his letter he wrote, quote, I haven't been sober for
more than a week in thirty years. If that was true,
it meant that while Morgan was filming Supersized Me, while
he was telling people that he was consuming nothing but McDonald's,
he'd actually been drinking a lot. If you look at
(35:28):
the film in that light, then those scenes with the
doctors where he gets all those bad test results, they
look really different because in the film, his doctors aren't
just worried about the test results, they also seem baffled
by them. They say that issues like these aren't usually
associated with eating fatty foods. They're more often caused by
something else.
Speaker 6 (35:45):
You know, we see people who go on an alcohol
binge and their numbers go up like crazy.
Speaker 9 (35:50):
That movie Death in Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage, I mean
that pickled his livery during the course of a few
weeks in Las Vegas, right right.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
The movie's actually called Leaving Las Vegas, and in it
Nicholas Cage plays an alcoholic who takes a trip to
Vegas to drink himself to death. That's the kind of
thing the doctors say would lead to the test results
Morgan was getting in Supersize ME.
Speaker 9 (36:09):
I would never have thought that you could do the
same thing with a high fat diet. If you're an alcoholic,
I say, I say, you're going to die. You keep drinking,
you'll die.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And in the time since the movie came out, there
have been more reasons to question it. In two thousand
and six, a professor of internal medicine at the University
of Lynn Chirping in Sweden, attempted to replicate the Supercized
ME results with a handful of college students. After thirty
days of clocking six thousand calories a day, all from
fast food. The students did see a jump in their
weight between five and fifteen percent, but those changes to
(36:39):
their liver were nothing close to what Morgan reported in
his film. Morgan's obituary in The New York Times cites
his twenty seventeen confession. Theobit says quote, in addition to
his McDonald's only diet, he was drinking, the fact that
he concealed from his doctors and the audience, and that
most likely skewed his results. These days, if you look
up supersized Me online, you'll find videos and social media
(37:00):
posts and Reddit threads of people saying that Morgan Spurlock
was a liar, that he faked the results of Supersize Me.
He polished his letter online. I'm twenty seventeen. Did you
read that letter?
Speaker 6 (37:13):
I did after it was published.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
This is Alex Jamison. Again. Morgan and Alex were not
together at the time of this letter. In two thousand
and six, Morgan and Alex got married and had a
son together. They divorced a few years later. Alex found
out about the letter through her sister.
Speaker 6 (37:28):
She's like, did you see Morgan's article? I was like,
what now like, So that whole week is a blur.
But yes, the letter, the letter had huge ramifications. We
hadn't lived together in years, so I wasn't privy to
(37:51):
how he was living his life. You know, I saw
him a couple times a month, always with our kid.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Alex told me that she wouldn't talk about the specifics
of the letter about any of what Morgan confessed to,
except for one thing. A lot of people took that
letter and then made in insans about the film supersized me,
and the big takeaway they got was that Morgan must
have been drinking during the filming and he was hiding it,
(38:19):
and is there anything you can say about that.
Speaker 6 (38:21):
He was not. Yes, Morgan drank alcohol throughout his life,
but he had stopped drinking a month before completely, wasn't
drinking during, wasn't drinking after because he was like, I
don't want booze to impact anything. So he was like
super clean.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah. I'll just ask one more question about that, which
is that the in the letter he says, quote, I
haven't been sober for more than a week in thirty years,
and he went on to say that one of the
things he did that he was ashamed of is he
was constantly hiding things from wives and girlfriends and loved ones.
(39:05):
Do you think it's possible that he could have been
hiding a pattern of drinking from you in that time?
Speaker 6 (39:12):
No, I really don't. He misspoke in that letter, and
I will say that he was again, I hadn't seen
him in a few weeks before he wrote that letter
or publish it. I don't know what his state of
mind was, but he was not in a great place
obviously when he wrote that. He didn't run it by
(39:34):
anybody before he published it, so I don't think he
was in the best place, and I think if I
had asked him to clarify he would have. The only
hard part about it for me is that we have
a kid, and it's really tough to have a famous parent,
(39:56):
especially when that famous parent is going through something really
hard and it's just you know it does It definitely
irks me that people are like, oh, supersized me was
a lie? Like it wasn't. He was not drinking, and
that's all there is to it. I don't know what
(40:16):
else to tell people except you got to take my
word for it, take Scott's word for it.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Scott is Scott and Brosi, the cinematographer and cameraman on
Supersize Me. The only cameraman.
Speaker 8 (40:28):
There's only one person in the world that can tell
you whether he was drinking or not, Okay, and that
would be me because I was with him, you know,
for those thirty days. You know, if not twenty four
hours a day, twenty three hours.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Scott and Morgan had worked together for years and other projects,
including I Bet You Will, the MTV show. When Morgan
had the idea for Supersize Me on his mom's couch
in West Virginia, Scott was the first person he called
while they were filming Supersize Me. Scott traveled with Morgan everywhere.
They were in the car together, they shared hotel rooms,
and Scott was always filming.
Speaker 8 (40:57):
And I can guarantee you that he was not drinking
during those times. I mean, I see he was in
the bathroom and he had a vial and he's swinging
it down. But you know, I didn't notice any kind
of change in his behavior or you know, his abilities
and whatnot. And to be perfectly honest, I don't, I
(41:18):
truly don't believe that he would break.
Speaker 11 (41:20):
His own rules.
Speaker 8 (41:21):
The rule was he could only consume something if it
came from McDonald's, and he did not break that rule,
and I was there and I know he didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Scott says that if Morgan was binge shrinking alone in
the bathroom or wherever, that would have been a hard
secret to keep from him, because Scott and Morgan were
close and Scott knew what Morgan was like after a
few drinks.
Speaker 8 (41:40):
There are moments in my life where I would hang
out with Morgan and I wish I didn't because the
next day was really important. Yeah, you know, it kind
of messed up a couple of important days from me.
Speaker 11 (41:52):
But we had fun, you know.
Speaker 8 (41:53):
I mean, you know, I was the guy with the
video camera in the nineties, and I always had a
video camera with me.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
When Scott and Morgan were making I Bet you Will,
they would get to their filming location, find the busiest
club or bar in town, and pass out flyers to
try to get contestants on the show, and they would
often stick around and party.
Speaker 8 (42:10):
I have all this footage of me and Morgan out
and a lot of it is, to be perfectly honest,
drunken camera stuff. And I've got some footage of Morgan
just completely trashed and just looking at the expression on
his face. And you know, back in the day, you're thinking, oh,
we're all just drinking, we're having good time. But now
looking at it with a different filter, you know.
Speaker 11 (42:32):
Yeah, I kind of do recognize that he had a problem.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
So if that's true, then what was really going on
with Morgan's liver and those test results? In the film,
we see one of his doctors telling Morgan that it's
likely a fatty liver disease, and according to Alex, the
official diagnosis was non alcoholics data appatitis, which is a
form of non alcoholic fatty liver disease. This is now
an extremely common diagnosis, but back in two thousand and three,
it wasn't that well understood. The conventional wisdom back then
(43:08):
was that liver damage is normally caused by alcohol abuse,
which is what you hear from the doctors. I spoke
with doctor Jeffrey Schumer. He's the founder and director of
the Fatty Liver Clinic at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego.
He's one of the top experts in the field, and
I should say he was not involved in the film
in any way. He explained that non alcoholic fatty liver
disease is largely genetic, but that diet also plays a role.
(43:31):
So if Morgan had the genetic predisposition, it's certainly possible
that this extreme diet was a factor in him developing
non alcoholic fatty liver disease, but it doesn't mean that
everyone who eats like this would have liver issues. Doctor
Schumer also said that those blood tests that Morgan takes
at the start of the film, they wouldn't have been
able to tell if Morgan had this genetic predisposition, and
they wouldn't have been able to give you a great
(43:52):
view into Morgan's liver chemistry. So in the film, the
story that Morgan lays out is that he consumed only
McDonald's and that's what caused these bad test results on
his liver. That's definitely possible, especially if he had this
genetic predisposition. Doctor Schumer stressed that, like so many issues
around health and nutrition and diet, it really depends on
the person and it's complicated, okay, on a chapter five
(44:21):
the legacy. When Supersized Me first came out twenty years ago,
one of the many people to see it was Emily Contois, Today,
she's an associate professor of Media Studies at the University
of Tulsa. She has a master's degree in public health
and has written a lot about gender, food, and body
image in media. Emily first supersized me in the theater
as a student at the University of Oklahoma. At the time,
(44:42):
she knew that she was interested in health and nutrition
issues that were getting a lot more attention across America
than ever before.
Speaker 10 (44:48):
So two thousand and three is the year that the
Surgeon General of the United States literally likens obesity to
the war on terror. He calls it the terror within
It is escalated to that extent that obesity is as
big of an issue as the War on terror, far
reloving nine to eleven. This is the first time that
it's called an epidemic being spoken about with the kinds
(45:11):
of language we typically use for like an infectious disease.
Right that's attacking US.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Governments and school districts began getting in on the fight.
In two thousand and three, California banned the sale of
soft drinks and grade schools. In two thousand and six,
all of the big beverage companies agreed to sell only small,
low calorie beverages in schools, and officials also turn their
attention to students.
Speaker 10 (45:29):
Arkansas is one of the first states to move to
a BMI report card in the public schools.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
BMI stands for body mass index and it's a calculation
based on your height and weight. It's supposed to measure
your body fat, and it's been used by doctors to
gauge risk factors and health, but it's been widely criticized
as inaccurate and not a great measure of a person's
overall health. Still, by twenty ten, millions of students were
receiving BMI report cards, and twenty nine states had policies
in place that encourage or required schools to waste students
(45:58):
or calculate their BMI so that as.
Speaker 10 (46:00):
A child gets their grades and they're sent home to
their parents to have conversations about their intellectual development, that
they would also be writ their BMI ranking as a
way to start converse within family about weight. And this
presumed need right to force little kids to lose weight.
And I cannot state strongly enough how bad of an
idea this was, but it was one that was absolutely
moved forward and at that moment where people really thought, right, like,
(46:23):
obesity is bad, we have to intervene, but there's nothing
worse we can do. They introduce all these food anxieties,
body anxieties right with children, like we have irrefutable evidence
that that causes poor relationships with eating, difficulties with weight,
you know, poor health outch items from yo yo dieting
or cycling through diets. That it can be much more
(46:44):
healthy to just focus on delicious fresh foods or you know,
focusing on learning how to cook or garden or something
like that, than ever focusing on weight.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
It's against this backdrop that Morgan is taking Supersize Me
to schools across the country doing talks and screenings. But
as I discussed with Emily, that backdrop today is very different.
So did you get a chance to watch Supersize Me again?
Speaker 3 (47:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 10 (47:05):
I watched it again with my husband. I watched it
together that first time, like twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Oh you watch it together back then? You watch it
together now?
Speaker 6 (47:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (47:12):
You know, what would you think?
Speaker 10 (47:14):
I didn't remember that. It's like the second shot in
the film that you have what fat activists themselves have
called the headless fatties. They were so common in news
reports about OBCD, and they are throughout this film in
multiple different moments.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
These are shots of crowds of people walking around, sometimes
in swimsuits on the beach with their stomachs showing, or
shots of people's thighs and hips and bellies. In the
film's intro these scenes are playing out with the song
Fat Bottom Girls as the soundtrack, and the shots are
just of people's bodies, either neck down or with their
faces blurt out.
Speaker 10 (47:49):
They do not have heads, they do not have faces,
they do not have eyes. These are people and they're
just being represented. Is these freakish objects right for us
to look at and to abhor their bodies?
Speaker 6 (48:01):
I don't think I knew what fat phobia was when
we made the movie. This is Alex again, and it
breaks my heart to think of any young people, especially
who watched the movie where there's definitely a couple scenes
where a fat body is made the butt of the joke,
(48:24):
and we were so wrong to do it that way.
And I think Morgan would agree. And I absolutely believe
that you can be healthy at any size. And I
wish I had known better, wish I could take that back.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
Despite these concerns, the film has been shown at health
class in schools for years, and it's still shown there
to this day. Before I talked with Emily, I asked
her if she could reach out to her recent students
to see if they'd watched Supersize Me in school. When
she pulled them, many said that they had, sometimes multiple times,
because their school would play the film year after year.
These students had plenty to say about it.
Speaker 10 (49:05):
The first bucket of their responses was that they were
really pursue waited by Spurlock's message about fast food consumption
being really bad for our health. They found that really worrisome,
and so a couple of them said, you know, it
really soured their views on fast food and they didn't
eat it again for years.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
There's a difference between parents and teachers telling you not
to eat McDonald's and seeing Morgan puke on the big screen.
So it did have that effect on some kids. And
in fact, in the year since the film came out,
those franchises made a lot of changes, adding healthier menu
options and posting calori accounts for customers. None of these
companies have ever said that the film was an influence
on their decision, but you can't deny the role of
super size me in the culture at the time. That said,
(49:44):
Emily tells me that some of her other undergrads had
different perspectives.
Speaker 10 (49:48):
Other students had really good health teachers, in my opinion
that they had more nuanced conversations about what might be
missing from the film and what its shortcomings would be.
But the one that touched my heart the most was
one student for whom you know, the fat stigma that
is so on the surface throughout the film really affected
her personally.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
The student saw the film in seventh grade health class.
She had experience of her teacher just putting the film
on one day with no context or discussion afterwards. Here's
what she wrote in her response.
Speaker 10 (50:16):
The movie did not help my self esteem in the slightest.
I was always a bigger kid, and this movie made
me feel even bigger. Overall, I hated this movie and
I would never show it to my students or to kids.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
In early twenty twenty three, Morgan Spurlock felt a pain
in his cheek. He went to a few dentists, then
some moorl surgeons, but he didn't get an official diagnosis
until three months later in June. He was cancer and
it was in stage three. He went through surgery and
radiation treatment, but then this past February the cancer returned.
Speaker 6 (50:50):
Cancer had spread everywhere, was in his lungs, was in
his brain. It was just, you know, so I had
to come over again and tell our kid, but it
has spread. I'm sorry, this is so it just happened,
(51:12):
you know. It's just so Haart. It's so wild to
be talking about Supersize me and remember him so vibrant
and healthy and excited, and he was always the most
energetic person in the realm. And to see him over
the course of a year just really with her and
diminish was heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
Morgan kept his cancer diagnosis private. He didn't even tell
close friends, so it was a shock to many people
to hear that he died this past May. Alex told
me that she really wanted people to know that Morgan
loved his kids, that he was a great father, even
during the hard times. She recalled a story from one
Halloween in particular with their son Liaken.
Speaker 6 (51:53):
So Lake, we asked, Lake, and what do you want
to be? And He's like cockroaches, Such a New York
City kid, right, It's like, I want to be cockroaches.
So Morgan had one of his friends who was like
a costume designer. May I wish we still had them.
They were easing cockroach costumes with little legs and they
were like easy to put on. It was so rad
(52:16):
and we walked around, the three of us and we
were cockroaches together. It was so cute. I mean, we
were not even together anymore, and we had the best
time that night.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
There was one more story. Alex wanted to tell me
about a story that she thinks Morgan would have loved
to hear.
Speaker 6 (52:32):
One of my good friends, she was one of the
few people I texted him and I was like, Hey,
you're going to see the announcement tomorrow. Morgan died today
and she was like are you are you ready? And
I was like, I bet you one hundred dollars. Within
the first twenty four hours, some Vegan reaches out to
(52:53):
me and says, do you think it was the McDonald's
that killed him? And it was like less than an hour.
I was like, twenty four hours and nope, Like within minutes,
people were like, oh wow, I'm sure it was that
McDonald's diet all those years ago that led to his death.
Make please, people come on cal him down. I know,
(53:15):
my goduck yeah, oh vegans, I'm an ex vegan. I
can say these things now.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Thanks to Alex Jamison, Sean Lawton, Scott and Brosie, doctor
Emily Contois, Hachi Chu Ku lux Eltrum, and doctor Jeffrey
Schwimmer for sharing their stories and expertise for this episode.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Thank you Senior producer Andre so'hara. Next week on the show,
I talked with the one and only Bobby flay Well
discuss how he got his start in food TV, why
he thinks TV chefs lose street cred, and what happened
when he called up the New York Times restaurant critic
after a bad review.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
That's next week.
Speaker 3 (53:55):
Meanwhile, if you want to hear more Sporkful episodes, check
out last week's show with Ed Gamble, comedian and co
host of the podcast Off Menu.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
That one's up now.
Speaker 3 (54:03):
And Hey, did you know you can listen to The
Sporkful and The Serious xm app?
Speaker 1 (54:06):
Yes, the Serious xm app.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over two hundred
AD free music channels curated by genre and era, plus
live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And
there's interviews with a list stars, and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music
app all rolled into one. Right now, Sportful listeners can
get three months free of the Serious XM app by
going to SiriusXM dot com slash spork full. This episode
(54:31):
was produced by me along with managment producer Imma Morgenstern and.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Senior producer Andres O'Hara.
Speaker 5 (54:36):
It was edited by Camille Stanley. Our engineer is Jared
O'Connell and our intern is Julia New Music help from
Black Label Music. The Sporkflow is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producers are Nora Richie and Colin Anderson. Until
Next Time, I'm Dan Pashmer and I'm Corey.
Speaker 6 (54:51):
I'm Jenny, and we're in New York City on our honeymoon.
Speaker 10 (54:54):
We just got done eating an excellent dinner at Antecha Maria,
and we're here to tell you to eat.
Speaker 13 (54:59):
More, eat better, and eat more better.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
That was Sporkfell's senior producer Andres O'Hara. If you're looking
for more Sporkful episodes to listen to, check out, their
episode is your recipe lying to you. An investigation into
all the ways recipes deceive you. Listen and follow this
sporkful wherever you get your podcasts.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hello, Hello, Malcolm Glabo here, it's been a busy season
Revisionist History. Coming up next week, we're bringing you an
argument on the American Siren. Do they even save time
when it comes to reaching emergencies? And what if we
didn't have them at all? That's next week. Today, we're
excited to show an episode from the podcast The Sporkful,
hosted by Dan Pashman. The Sporkful is not for foodies,
(00:42):
it's for eaters, and every week they obsess about food
to learn more about people, which is actually something we'll
be exploring in a few weeks on Revisionist History with
a special episode on the beloved nooks and crannies of
Thomas's English Muffins. Stay tuned for that. But this episode
of The Sporkful looks at the legacy of the documentary
(01:04):
Supersized Me. The film started as a stunt what would
Happen if Morgan's Adoni McDonald's for thirty Days? But this
slow budget film became a nationwide hit and turned Morgan
into a household name. Years later, at the peak of
his career, Morgan published a confession that tanked his career
and called into question the results of the film. So
(01:27):
what was really going on in Supersized Me? And why
after all these years is it still being shown in schools.
Here's Dan Pashman.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Please note this episode contains references to sexual abuse and
disordered eating. All right, let's make some authentic sound effects here.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Mine's going to become a man right now. It's a
little baby, a little baby in a can and then.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Oh man, fully sound effects. Eat your heart out.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
We got a second career.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Ten years ago I interviewed the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.
At the time, in his Twitter bio, he called himself
a Guinness drinking West Virginia hillbilly. So I thought, let's
chat over some Guinness. Imagine if your whole job was
just to open and drink beer to make sound.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Effects, how do I get that job?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
But Morgan wasn't there just to talk about Guinness. He
was promoting his new Showtime series Seven Deadly Sins. Each
episode was a story about a person who embodies one
of those sins. The show leaned heavily on extremes like
extreme eating and the extreme ways people treat their bodies.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Her goal was to become the fattest person in the
world like she wanted to break the Guinness Book a
world record, and then once she hit six hundred and
some pounds, somewhere in there she had this like elevated
sexuality within her body that she just wanted to explore
and enjoy.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I couldn't help but see the link between this project
and Morgan's most famous film, Supersize Me. It's a documentary
where Morgan himself goes to extremes, eating nothing but McDonald's
for thirty days and monitoring how it affects his body.
Morgan told me that for him, these extremes have a purpose.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
I'm more interested in people thinking about the choices that
we make, and you know, through something that is I
think shocking or offensive.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Supersize Me came out twenty years ago. When Morgan Spurlock
released it, he achieved a status that most documentary filmmakers
can only dream about. The film made millions at the
box office, it was nominated for an Academy Award, and
it turned Morgan into a star. And to this day,
the film is still shown in middle school and high
school health classes across America. Morgan went on to make
more documentaries. It seemed like for a time he was
(03:35):
taking on some of the biggest cultural and social issues
in this country. Then one of the biggest cultural issues
in America caught up with him when he made a
shocking confession at the height of the Me Too movement.
Part of that confession also had an impact on Supersize Me,
calling into question how real key parts of the film
actually were. This past May, Morgan died of cancer. He
(03:55):
was fifty three. Almost no one knew he was sick,
and his death revealed just how much he had disappeared
from public life since his confession. Today on the show,
we're asking who really was Morgan Spurlock, What was it
about Supersize Me that made it such a huge and
after all these years, should we still be showing it
to kids? This is the sport fall. It's not for foodies,
(04:18):
it's for eaters.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
I'm Dan Pashman.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to
learn more about people. Today, we're bringing you the inside
story of Supersize Me and a look at the film's
legacy today. Because it's a pretty epic and complicated story,
our senior producer Andre Sohara looked into it.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
I'm going to tell you the story of Supersize Me
in five chapters. We'll start with chapter one, the prologue.
This chapter starts in a farmhouse outside of Portland, Oregon,
in the nineteen seventies. That's where Alex Jamison grew up.
Her parents were, in her words, back to the land hippies.
Speaker 6 (04:51):
My mom had an organic gardening radio show for a decade.
It was called Eves Organic Garden, And once a year
I would go on the show and do a children's
gardening corner and talk about growing strawberries or butterfly pollinating plants.
Thanks like that.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Alex's family would harvest vegetables from the garden and barter
for chickens and local honey from their neighbors. But eventually
Alex went away for college and she ate like a
lot of college students, plenty of junk food and sweets,
not a whole lot of veggies. And she continued eating
that way in her early twenties when she moved to
New York and got her first big job.
Speaker 6 (05:28):
So I was a legal assistant and it was just
grueling work, and the first time I'd ever had to
sit down artificial lighting ten to twelve hour days, and
I just started eating more sugar, more caffeine to get
through the day, and I started getting horrible migraines.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Doctors prescribed painkillers and antidepressants, but she didn't want to
go down that path.
Speaker 6 (05:50):
So I found another doctor that you had a Buddha
and ferns in his office, and she actually asked me
like what I was eating.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
This doctor suggested that Alex make some changes to her diet.
And when Alex got this advice, it was her light
bulb moment, the idea that what you eat can affect
your health in all kinds of different ways. So she
went to the library and dove into books about health
and nutrition. This was in the nineties, pre Google. Within
a few weeks, she radically changed her diet. She went vegan,
(06:21):
and then she went further.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
Took everything out gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, caffeine. First week
was horrible. You feel worse before you feel better.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Six months after making these changes, Alex left her job
at the law firm and enrolled at the Natural Gourmet Institute,
a cooking school in New York. At night, she worked
as a cocktail waitress. One night, while working at the bar,
she met a guy named Morgan Spurlock, and they started flirting.
The next week, he came to the bar when Alex's
shift ended at four am, and he took her out
(06:54):
to breakfast. They started dating and Alex began learning about
Morgan's life. Morgan grew up in Beckley, West Virginia. His
mother was a public school teacher and his dad owned
a tool machine shop. Morgan was the youngest of three boys.
Speaker 6 (07:06):
And he and his older brothers growing up in Beckley
were all ballet dancers. His eldest brother, Craig, actually went professional.
I just think it's so cool that their parents were
supportive of that to be ballerinos. Yeah, and you know,
Morgan also really got into student government. I mean, the
(07:28):
most energetic person on the planet.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
At the time. Morgan had two very different ideas about
what he wanted to do with his life. One idea
came from that student government side. He wanted to go
to West Point and join the army and then become
a politician. But Morgan didn't get into West Point, so
he pursued a second idea, acting. He ended up at
the film program at New York University. After graduating, he
(07:52):
pursued acting for a few years, but it wasn't really
working out, so he opened his own production company. This
is when he and Alex started dating. He was thirty
and she was twenty five.
Speaker 6 (08:02):
I was like, so, what do you do for a living.
He's like, I'm a producer and I was like, what
does that mean. He's like, I make things happen. I
was like, oh my god, please never say that to
anyone ever again. That's disgusting. And he thought that was hilarious.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
One of his projects was an online video series called
I Bet You Will.
Speaker 6 (08:20):
He would say this himself. He's like, it was just
the dumbest ideas. It's what you would do in high
school with your friends, like I'll give you five dollars
if you'll eat you know, three sandwiches in less than
five minutes, you know, just betting people to do stupid
stuff for money.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Getting people to do stupid stuff for money. It wasn't
exactly a new concept, but it was a hot idea
at the time, and the show got acquired by MTV.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
He got a bigger budget, going down to the Jersey
shore for spring break and crowds of teenagers, you know,
betting each other to do things. It was ridiculous.
Speaker 7 (08:54):
I will pay you one hundred dollars cash to stuff
this entire pizza into your pants.
Speaker 8 (09:00):
Are you ready?
Speaker 7 (09:00):
Yeah, she's gonna go for I will give you four
hundred dollars cash to put on the I Bet you
will phone, you will jump rope while we spray you
with milk. Right here, we have I Bet you owe
meal worms over a night, right, and of course the
world famous I Bet you will Madagascar hitt and cockroaches.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah, in that last one, he's challenging a contestant to
put cockroaches and meal worms down her pants. Do you
think at the time, like, was he happy? Was he
excited about this?
Speaker 8 (09:32):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (09:32):
He was over the moon. He was so excited. At
the same time, he was broke. We were both broke.
He loved that I was in culinary school because I
would bring all leftovers from school and feed the office.
And he was actually living in the office at that
point because he couldn't afford an apartment for at least
a year.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I think Morgan had discovered that even though he was
gaining success with his MTV show, it wasn't really paying
the bills.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
He was like paying employees with credit cards. He was
like going and doing like man with a van jobs
on Craigslist. He would work a full day in the
production office and then go, you know, lift shit for
other people for like forty bucks, just so he could
like buy Metro cards for his staff, like he really
really was the hardest worker.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
After two seasons, I Bet You Will didn't get renewed,
but Morgan had made some money from the show and
he had to figure out what to do next. He
was in a lot of debt at the time, somewhere
between sixty and seventy thousand dollars, so one option would
be to use that money to pay down that debt. Instead,
he decided to ignore it for a little while longer
and find his next project, Chapter two, The Idea. In
(10:49):
two thousand and two, Morgan and Alex were in West
Virginia for Thanksgiving with Morgan's family.
Speaker 6 (10:54):
We were on his mom's couch and we were watching
the news and there was the story about two teenage
girls in New York City who were suing McDonald's.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
The two girls, who lived in the Bronx were suing
McDonald's for damages related to obesity. They argued that McDonald's
was responsible for their adverse health outcomes because it didn't
tell customers about the health risks of its food. As
the new story continued, a spokesperson for McDonald's came on.
He said that you can't link McDonald's to obesity at all,
because their food was healthy and nutritious.
Speaker 6 (11:27):
And he was like, well, what would happen if I
just ate nothing about McDonald's for a month? And I
was like, please don't do that. And he's like, wait
a minute, that's a great Like that's literally what happened.
We had a fight on the couch and I was like,
please don't do this, And so.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Were you thinking of all the people I could have met?
Speaker 6 (11:46):
Well, you know, I was in love with him, and
he was a goofball. And Morgan's attitude was well, if
I feel like crap, it'll be a good movie, and
if nothing happens to me, it'll be a great advertisement
for McDonald's and I'll see if they want to buy it.
And I was like, oh my god, dude, Okay, go ahead,
(12:07):
and he was off.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Morgan got to work. The film starts off with Morgan
consulting with three doctors to get a baseline of his health.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
Your blood tests are excellent, your blood level's fine, your
iron level is good as well.
Speaker 9 (12:26):
You have no evileness or diabet. This your fostering, but
sugars very low.
Speaker 10 (12:29):
Your kidney function, your liver function, they were all perfect.
Speaker 7 (12:33):
You don't smoke, I used to.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I don't any drug use at all, not for a
long time. Any alcohol use now none.
Speaker 9 (12:40):
Is there anything that we didn't cover? Is anything else
you need to tell me?
Speaker 5 (12:43):
Yeah, I don't think so.
Speaker 9 (12:45):
Patient is embarking on a one month McDonald's binge.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
As he sets off, Morgan creates rules for this experiment.
He has to adopt the lifestyle of an average American,
so he stops exercising, and he even cuts back on
the amount that he walks. He'll only consume food and
drink Solda McDonald's, nothing else, And if he's asked if
he wants to supersize him, he has to say yes.
The whole thing. It feels sort of scientific with the
(13:13):
rules and the doctors and the blood tests. But you
also see the Morgan if I bet you will the
one who wants to go to extremes and have a
lot of fun doing it.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
Yeah, could I get the double quarter pounder with cheese meal?
Speaker 4 (13:30):
I think I'm gonna have to go supersize.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
On day two, Morgan gets his first supersize meal and
he is pumped.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Look at that.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Look at how big that thing is. Look at how
big that French fry is. But then as he starts eating,
Morgan's enthusiasm drops.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
But I'm just not even I'm not even halfway done
with those fries.
Speaker 9 (13:49):
I'm in half way.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Five minutes goes by, and then ten as he's pushing
himself to finish the whole meal.
Speaker 11 (13:56):
Oh, let's give me a minute.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
He's in his car eating in the McDonald's parking lot,
and suddenly he leans out the window and pukes. The
camera then goes over his shoulder and you can see
the mess that Morgan's meet on the pavement. But Morgan
doesn't quit. After day three, his body seems to adapt
to his new diet and he's putting away McDonald's much
(14:21):
more easily. Day five is his first weigh in with
his dieticians. He started out weighing one hundred and eighty
five pounds.
Speaker 11 (14:28):
We had to stop everything.
Speaker 8 (14:29):
I don't believe it.
Speaker 7 (14:30):
One hundred and ninety five pounds pay.
Speaker 11 (14:32):
He camped that we have to redo this.
Speaker 6 (14:34):
You're in a gain to actually about five percent of your
body weight. Losing weight that fast and gaining weight that
fast is not healthy.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
After ten days, Morgan's gained nearly ten percent of his
bodyweight seventeen pounds. He's also getting headaches, feeling depressed, and
sluggish at times. He's eating five thousand calories a day.
Speaker 7 (14:53):
I officially had to loosen my belt the other day
from I had to lego a notch lower, not one notch.
Speaker 6 (15:00):
Girlfriend Loving you.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Morgan's girlfriend, of course, is Alex, who you've been hearing from.
She's introduced as Morgan's girlfriend and vegan chef, but she
also worked with Morgan behind the scenes on the film.
Alex connected Morgan with nutrition experts and got Morgan to
look into school lunch programs for the film. In one
notable scene, she appears on camera to talk about what
Morgan's supersized diet has been like for her.
Speaker 12 (15:24):
It's hard for me to watch him go through this.
He's exhausted by the end of the day, just so tired,
gets home really late from work, and you know, he
gets all jacked up on sugar and caffeine and then
he crashes and then when we too have sex. I
gotta tell you he's not quite as energetic as.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
He used to be.
Speaker 11 (15:48):
I have to be on top.
Speaker 12 (15:50):
Otherwise he uh, you know, he gets tired easily. I
think the saturated fats are starting to impede the blood
flow to his penis.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
I didn't know if anybody was going to see this.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Alex told me that in the decades since the film
came out, she's been asked about that scene a lot.
Speaker 6 (16:11):
If I had known I'd be sitting next to my
grandmother in a movie theater watching this scene, I wouldn't
have said it, but I'm glad I did.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Alex believed in the message of the film, even if
she had always loved Morgan's tactics. At the time, she
was working as a personal chef, and some of her
clients were people dealing with serious illnesses. For Alex, this
scene showed how a poor diet can affect all parts
of your life, not just the most obvious ones. Anyway,
up to this point in the film, Morgan's powering through
and it seems like he's having fun. But about two
(16:41):
weeks in things take a turn for the worse.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
It's like two in the morning.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I yeah, I woke up.
Speaker 10 (16:48):
I couldn't breathe.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
It felt like I was having a heart palpitations.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
He sees one of his doctors who doesn't really know
why Morgan is experiencing these symptoms. The doctor seems worried.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
If it pays starts to radiate to Joe down your arm,
that's life threatening and immediately. So yeah, so I need
to hear about that, or you need to go on
line one.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Okay, Morgan gets his full blood work done again. His
cholesterol and his body fat are way up. But it's
worse than that.
Speaker 9 (17:16):
Okay, for the first time, we see uric acid elevators.
So you're giving yourself hyper urysmia, and the danger of
hyperurysmia is gout kidney stones. The results for your liver
are obscene, beyond anything I would have thought. You're sick,
and you're making yourself sick, and then you can make
yourself unsick by stopping doing what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Suddenly, this fun goofy stunt gets very serious and you
can see Morgan right in the middle of this experiment,
reckon with the fact that he might have done some
real damage to his body, and he doesn't know what's
going to happen if he keeps going.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
I'm terrified, like, dude, stop, you've proven your point, you've
done it. Please stop, like it's gotten so bad so quickly.
Imagine what another two weeks will do to you. And
he loved to tell this story about how he called
all his friends and he talked to all the doctors
and me, and everybody is saying stop. They talked to Craig,
who is one of my favorite people on earth, his
(18:12):
oldest brother, Craig. Craig is like, Morgan, people eat this
crap their whole lives. I think another two weeks is
going to kill you. And where He's like, great, I'm
gonna keep going.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
And spoiler alert, I guess Morgan survives. He keeps up
his McDonald's diet, and he goes back to the dieticians
for one final way in. At the end of the
thirty days, he marches to the scale wearing only a
tiny speedo with an image of the American flag on it.
Speaker 12 (18:37):
Woo okay, oh yeah, oh boy, say two to.
Speaker 9 (18:46):
Ten right on the money.
Speaker 7 (18:48):
And only thirty days of eating nothing but McDonald's, I
gained twenty four and a half pounds, My liver turned
to fat, and my cholesterol shot up. Sixty five points.
My body fat percentage went from eleven to eighteen percent.
I nearly doubled my risk of coronary heart disease, making
myself twice as likely to have heart failure.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
I filed there.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
The movie ends with Alex taking control. She puts Morgan
on a vegan high fiber diet. After six weeks, his
cholesterol and liver functions go back to normal. It then
takes him five months to lose twenty pounds. Chapter three
a Supersized Success. Morgan finished the film at the end
(19:29):
of two thousand and three, and then things started happening
very quickly. Supersized Me was selected for the Sundance Film Festival,
so Morgan and Alex flew up to Utah for the premiere.
The screen room was packed, and then the movie started playing.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
There's like Morgan talking to the camera like I'm ready
Supersize Me, and then the Queen Song starts right Fat
Bottom Girls was opening the movie, and like the crowd
erupted into applause and cheers, and I was like, that's
not normal, that's not normal. This is Sundance. And Morgan
(20:04):
and I were standing room only. We were in the
back of the theater. We ran out to the lobby
and we were just like, oh my, oh God, like
people might actually like this, Like I think this is
gonna happen.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Morgan when the Documentary Directing Award at Sundance, and just
like that, it seemed like everybody wanted this film.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
And then we went to over twenty countries in the
next year, going to film festivals around the world, and
the first and only time I ever flew first class,
like we got put in the best hotels. We went
to Australia for like three different film festivals. I mean,
I can never go back to Australia because I flew
(20:42):
their first class and I think that's probably a really
rough trip if you're not in the big, fancy seats.
So it was just it was just really fun. It
was an amazing opportunity.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Supersize Me, which had a sixty five thousand dollars budget,
grossed twenty two million dollars. It was a huge figure
for a documentary. It was even nominated for an Oscar.
Morgan's Burlock became a household name and the film became
sort of a shorthand even if you didn't see it,
you knew the gist.
Speaker 13 (21:07):
Of it.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
This guy ate nothing but mcdone for a month and
he got really sick. Six weeks after the film was released,
McDonald's discontinued its super Size menu. The company said that
at the time, the film didn't affect their decision. Alex
was also getting a lot of attention. She set up
a website and posted some of the recipes that were
featured in the movie. Once the film came out, she
received thousands of messages from people who wanted her advice
(21:30):
on health and nutrition.
Speaker 6 (21:31):
And we were just both really honored and excited that
I was getting to talk about food and health with
people all around the world, and he was getting to
do film and TV. We both got book deals out
of it. Morgan's next project got greenlit to do another
show like it. Just so much was happening so quickly.
(21:52):
I was like, Wow, I guess I should start a
health coaching business. Okay, So that was the next ten
years for me. So it was Yeah, it was a
happy time.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Well, Morgan was at Sundance celebrating his success. Across the country.
In Washington, DC, Sean Lawton was looking for his next
big client. Sean was a speaking agent. He booked speakers
for universities. That was his market.
Speaker 13 (22:19):
My buyers are eighteen to twenty two year olds who
somehow are in charge of enormous amounts of money, and
they get to decide who comes to their school. Around
two thousand and two, two thousand and three, we started
to see Michael Moore and Eric Schlosser. Those guys just
got booked everywhere.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Eric Schlosser was the author of Fast Food Nation, The
Dark Side of the All American Meal. It came out
in two thousand and one. The next year, Michael Moore
released his hit documentary book Gun Violence Bowling for Columbine.
Speaker 13 (22:50):
I mean, they were doing universities everywhere you turned. The
problem was I didn't represent either one of those. And
so you're like, Okay, I'm going to find the next thing.
And my then girlfriend showed me a news article and said, hey,
read this. And it was just a short blurb about
supersized me and the reception that it got. And I
read it and I'm like, oh my god, Michael Moore
(23:12):
and Eric Slusher had a love child, and that is
going to be my next speaker. And I came into
the office that day and I told my assistant, I said,
you have one job today, find me Morgan Spurlock.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Sean got Morgan on the phone while he was still
at sun Dance. A week later, Sean signed Morgan as
his client and got to work booking him at universities.
Speaker 13 (23:32):
I'm booking him. I haven't met him. I haven't seen
the movie. So it's a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
You booked him without meeting him and without seeing the movie? Yes,
what made you feel like I can actually take the
risk and book this guy without having met him and
without seeing the thing that everyone's talking about?
Speaker 13 (23:51):
It was just it was an irresistible hook man each
thirty days of McDonald's and lives to talk about it. Truthfully,
the movie's success was somewhat irrelevant because it wasn't the movie. Ultimately,
it was Morgan because he was this bigger than life personality.
He was such a confident guy and I was a
little arrogant myself. So we were, you know, a pretty
(24:13):
brash duo going out there and saying, Hey, this is
going to be the thing you need to bring to
your campus. And within our first year, our first twelve months,
we booked seventy two speaking engagements at universities, These.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Talks were lucrative for Morgan. In two thousand and four,
his fee started at seventy five hundred dollars per talk.
The next year that feed doubled. Morgan spoken packed campus
auditoriums across the country about the Supersize Me story, and
after his first year on the road, more and more
schools wanted him.
Speaker 13 (24:41):
What was really surprising to me was the staying power
of Supersize Me. Okay, here's a movie that comes out
in two thousand and four, it's on home video. By
you know, two thousand and six, two thousand and seven,
you would think, Okay, that movie has had its run.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Morgan had also moved on. In two thousand and five,
he launched the series Thirty Days on FX, where he
attempted to live a totally different life for a month.
In two thousand and eight, he got a little more
ambitious and made a film where he tried to track
down a sol'ma bin laden. But Sean says, wherever Morgan
went to speak, everyone wanted to hear about Supersize Me.
Sean and Morgan knew how to capitalize on that interest,
(25:18):
even in places where the film might have gotten them
in a little trouble.
Speaker 13 (25:21):
I remember getting contracts from especially from some religious schools
that would you know, have morality clauses in them about
the language, and you know, if the morality clauses were breached,
they wouldn't pay. First thing I thought was, Okay, we've
got a scene here with Morgan's naked buttocks, and we've
got a couple of f words. Southern Methodist University might
(25:45):
not be ready for this next thing. You know, Morgan
had a family friendly cut of the movie made that
he could take out to schools with religious affiliations or
eventually high schools and secondary schools.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Creating this PG version of the film was a crucial
decision that helps explain the film's staying power and how
it ended up being taught in health classes across the
country to this day. At the time, Morgan was also
being asked to speak in middle schools in high schools,
and when he gave these talks, he brought a copy
of this school friendly version of Supersize Me. He mostly
got positive, encouraging responses from parents and teachers, but not always.
Speaker 13 (26:19):
I remember vividly a woman standing up and she was like,
I appreciate you coming here. I loved the movie. I
loved your story. I'm a single mom. I've got three kids,
child supports not cutting it. You know, I got to
work these jobs. I got to you know, I have
childcare in limited capacity. What am I supposed to do?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
The mother said that she often picked up McDonald's for
her kids. It was a fast and inexpensive way to
get dinner on the table. And now here's this film
telling her that this is actually a terrible choice.
Speaker 13 (26:50):
And that was one of the few times Morgan didn't
have a good comeback, And that was one of the
things that I think kind of stuck with him through
the Supersize Me cycle is okay, here I did open
Pandora's box, you know now what? And I think one
of the things that he was going to eventually try
to unravel was supersize Me too, which was what would
it look like if we reinvented the fast food model?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Coming up thirteen years after the premiere Supersized Me, Morgan
launches his next big project, a sequel, But just as
the film is about to be released, he does something
that brings his whole career crashing down. Stick around.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
All right back to the show. Senior producer Andre Sohara
picks it up from here.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Okay on the chapter four part of the problem. In
the years after Morgan's Barlock released Supersized Me, while Morgan
was touring the country talking about US film and making
other documentaries, fast food companies went on a marketing blitz
to convince the public that their food was fresher, cleaner,
and healthier, and in fact, some of those companies wanted
to recruit Morgan in their campaigns. In twenty sixteen, an
(28:04):
ad agency reached out to him. The idea was to
create a fake documentary where he investigate It's Hearty's and
Carls Junior and then discovers, to his utmost surprise, that
they're actually really healthy. Morgan never took the job, but
that pitch gave him his next big idea. What if
he started his own fast food restaurant. That's the premise
of Supersize Me Too, Holy Chicken. Morgan sets out to
(28:25):
create a fast food restaurant in Columbus, Ohio called Holy
Chicken to see if he can make fast food that's
actually good for you. He decides to raise his own
chickens for the restaurant, but when he does that, he
confronts the dark world of factory farming, where animals bread
from meat are getting sick and dropping dead, and small
farmers who are deeply in debt to giant meat companies
are terrified speaking out. The film has Morgan Spurlock's special sauce.
(28:48):
It's gruesome and infuriating while still being funny and captivating.
Supersize Me, Too premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in
September of twenty seventeen, where was acquired by YouTube for
a three point five million dollars. The film was set
to be released in theaters in early twenty eighteen. Morgan
was still working with Sean Lawton, his speaking agent, and
they had big plans for the release.
Speaker 13 (29:08):
I was excited about, you know, going back and you
know a little bit like getting the band back together.
You know, I was going to be taking this out
to colleges who don't even remember this first Supersize Me.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Sean was also making big changes in his own life.
After working at the same place for twenty years, Sean
made the jump to a new agency in Colorado, which
would be a big step up for him. He'd be
taking his clients with him, and Morgan was a big
draw for this new agency. Sean and his wife had
just had a baby, and now they were moving across
the country to start a new life in Colorado.
Speaker 13 (29:37):
With the movie on the horizon. You know, Morgan was
in a really good place. I was in a really
good place. There was a lot of excitement. We were both,
you know, somewhat giddy about what the future held.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
In December of twenty seventeen, Sean had finished his move
to Colorado and jumped on a flight back east for
the holidays.
Speaker 13 (29:54):
And I was on the plane and I landed at
Reagan Airport, and as soon as I turned my phone on,
my notifications lit up in a way that I don't
know that I've ever seen them before or since. I mean,
I knew something was wrong. I thought something terrible had
happened to my family. But then as I started opening
emails and text messages, it was journalists and they were
all like, do you have a comment on the Morgan
(30:15):
Spurlock story. And I was like, uh, oh, what's the
Morgan Spurlock story.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
At the height of me too, Morgan had written a
letter and posted it online. It was titled I Am
Part of the Problem. In it, he describes an experience
in college where he had a one night stand with
a woman, one that she later described as rape. He
confessed to paying a settlement to another woman who worked
for his company for sexual harassment. He admitted to infidelity
and belittling and demeaning women in his office. He said
(30:44):
he'd been an alcoholic for decades and that alcohol had
been a way to cope with his depression, and he
also said that he'd been sexually abused as a child.
Near the end of the letter, he writes, quote, I
am part of the problem. We all are, but I
am also part of the solution. By recognizing and openly
admitting what I've done to further this terrible situation, I
hope to empower the change within myself. We should all
(31:06):
find the courage to admit we're at fault.
Speaker 13 (31:09):
I remember thinking this is really bad. This is not
going to go well. So the first thing I did,
I hadn't even gotten home yet. I called Morgan and
he was not himself, and I think he was just
starting to come to grips with the fact of what
he had done, and it was very clear that the
reaction he was expecting was not the reaction he got.
(31:32):
Morgan was a very thoughtful, funny, organized guy. He told
stories that felt very organic, but they were very well sculpted.
And this was a meandering, poorly written diatribe that conflated
things that had nothing to do with the other thing.
And it was just a mess. And the first thing
(31:54):
I thought was he was probably under the influence when
he wrote this, and I don't think he had any
idea what was about to happen. Literally the day that
he posted that, every business partner, every client, every brand deal,
everybody left. I mean it was rapid, it was sudden,
it was complete. I mean he did not have many
people left in his orbit.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
YouTube pulled out of the deal for Supersize Me Too,
The film was dropped from Sundance, and Morgan stepped down
from his production company, Warrior Poets. Five days later, Jezebel
published a story about the culture at Warrior Poets. Seven
women who are former employees described a freddy boys club
culture where nude paintings were hung on the wall, alcohol
was pushed on employees, and women were frequently commented on
(32:38):
based on their looks. Sean Lawton had to drop Morgan
as a client.
Speaker 13 (32:42):
And I remember calling the head of the agency that
I just moved to, and I said, hey, I got
some news, and I remember it was the first time
that I realized that I was in a lot of trouble.
A few months into that relationship, they did terminate my contract.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
After Morgan published his letter, he briefly checked into a
rehab facility. A month later, Sean was in New York
and wanted to meet with Morgan for the first time
since they parted ways.
Speaker 13 (33:06):
I texted and I said, hey, let's meet. It a
die airless talk, and I remember he came in and
it was like looking at a ghost. You know, it
was the first time I've seen him clean shaven, you know,
the trade bark mustache was gone. You know, his hair
was thinning, he the eyes were sunken. He just looked
like somebody who was still in shock. Even after I
(33:28):
guess that point had probably been about six weeks. I
talked a lot about his sobriety and how important that
was to him, And even then I was trying to
let him know that, you know, this is not going
to be easy. I can't speak to you know, the
experience of his victims, and and I think that should
be the first thought. And I think one of the
(33:48):
things that you know, in our later years and later
conversations that always rubbed him the wrong way is there
were people who didn't ever apologize, they didn't take ownership
of it, and they didn't wind up getting canceled. They
still got endorsements, they still got to do deals, they
still got to be out in the public, and he
never got that opportunity. And he felt like, but I confessed,
I apologized, why didn't I get the same grace? He
(34:11):
was always looking for that fast forward button. It's like,
how do we skip this part? And I'm like, you
can't skip this part. I said, you're going to have
to go through this and you don't get to decide
how long that's going to take. And that was the
one thing that you know, we probably had maybe three
or four conversations over the years after that, and you know,
every time it always started with, Hey, can you bring
me back as a client? You know, I really want
to go out there and I want to do speaking again,
(34:32):
and you know, I really love it, and I'm like, look,
you're one of the best speakers I've ever worked with.
You've been a great friend, you were a huge part
of my early career. You put me on the map
as a speaking agent. But I mean, we don't live
in a world right now where we can just act
like this didn't happen. I mean, you confess to some
bad things. And he was like, what else do I
have to do? And I'm like, that's not for me
to decide. But you have not healed yourself enough to
(34:55):
be able to go out and resume your work. And
that was the one thing that I just don't know
if it ever got through to him.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Morgan's confession didn't just topple his career, it also into
question his most famous work, Supersize Me. That's because in
his letter he wrote, quote, I haven't been sober for
more than a week in thirty years. If that was true,
it meant that while Morgan was filming Supersized Me, while
he was telling people that he was consuming nothing but McDonald's,
he'd actually been drinking a lot. If you look at
(35:28):
the film in that light, then those scenes with the
doctors where he gets all those bad test results, they
look really different because in the film, his doctors aren't
just worried about the test results, they also seem baffled
by them. They say that issues like these aren't usually
associated with eating fatty foods. They're more often caused by
something else.
Speaker 6 (35:45):
You know, we see people who go on an alcohol
binge and their numbers go up like crazy.
Speaker 9 (35:50):
That movie Death in Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage, I mean
that pickled his livery during the course of a few
weeks in Las Vegas, right right.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
The movie's actually called Leaving Las Vegas, and in it
Nicholas Cage plays an alcoholic who takes a trip to
Vegas to drink himself to death. That's the kind of
thing the doctors say would lead to the test results
Morgan was getting in Supersize ME.
Speaker 9 (36:09):
I would never have thought that you could do the
same thing with a high fat diet. If you're an alcoholic,
I say, I say, you're going to die. You keep drinking,
you'll die.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And in the time since the movie came out, there
have been more reasons to question it. In two thousand
and six, a professor of internal medicine at the University
of Lynn Chirping in Sweden, attempted to replicate the Supercized
ME results with a handful of college students. After thirty
days of clocking six thousand calories a day, all from
fast food. The students did see a jump in their
weight between five and fifteen percent, but those changes to
(36:39):
their liver were nothing close to what Morgan reported in
his film. Morgan's obituary in The New York Times cites
his twenty seventeen confession. Theobit says quote, in addition to
his McDonald's only diet, he was drinking, the fact that
he concealed from his doctors and the audience, and that
most likely skewed his results. These days, if you look
up supersized Me online, you'll find videos and social media
(37:00):
posts and Reddit threads of people saying that Morgan Spurlock
was a liar, that he faked the results of Supersize Me.
He polished his letter online. I'm twenty seventeen. Did you
read that letter?
Speaker 6 (37:13):
I did after it was published.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
This is Alex Jamison. Again. Morgan and Alex were not
together at the time of this letter. In two thousand
and six, Morgan and Alex got married and had a
son together. They divorced a few years later. Alex found
out about the letter through her sister.
Speaker 6 (37:28):
She's like, did you see Morgan's article? I was like,
what now like, So that whole week is a blur.
But yes, the letter, the letter had huge ramifications. We
hadn't lived together in years, so I wasn't privy to
(37:51):
how he was living his life. You know, I saw
him a couple times a month, always with our kid.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Alex told me that she wouldn't talk about the specifics
of the letter about any of what Morgan confessed to,
except for one thing. A lot of people took that
letter and then made in insans about the film supersized me,
and the big takeaway they got was that Morgan must
have been drinking during the filming and he was hiding it,
(38:19):
and is there anything you can say about that.
Speaker 6 (38:21):
He was not. Yes, Morgan drank alcohol throughout his life,
but he had stopped drinking a month before completely, wasn't
drinking during, wasn't drinking after because he was like, I
don't want booze to impact anything. So he was like
super clean.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah. I'll just ask one more question about that, which
is that the in the letter he says, quote, I
haven't been sober for more than a week in thirty years,
and he went on to say that one of the
things he did that he was ashamed of is he
was constantly hiding things from wives and girlfriends and loved ones.
(39:05):
Do you think it's possible that he could have been
hiding a pattern of drinking from you in that time?
Speaker 6 (39:12):
No, I really don't. He misspoke in that letter, and
I will say that he was again, I hadn't seen
him in a few weeks before he wrote that letter
or publish it. I don't know what his state of
mind was, but he was not in a great place
obviously when he wrote that. He didn't run it by
(39:34):
anybody before he published it, so I don't think he
was in the best place, and I think if I
had asked him to clarify he would have. The only
hard part about it for me is that we have
a kid, and it's really tough to have a famous parent,
(39:56):
especially when that famous parent is going through something really
hard and it's just you know it does It definitely
irks me that people are like, oh, supersized me was
a lie? Like it wasn't. He was not drinking, and
that's all there is to it. I don't know what
(40:16):
else to tell people except you got to take my
word for it, take Scott's word for it.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Scott is Scott and Brosi, the cinematographer and cameraman on
Supersize Me. The only cameraman.
Speaker 8 (40:28):
There's only one person in the world that can tell
you whether he was drinking or not, Okay, and that
would be me because I was with him, you know,
for those thirty days. You know, if not twenty four
hours a day, twenty three hours.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Scott and Morgan had worked together for years and other projects,
including I Bet You Will, the MTV show. When Morgan
had the idea for Supersize Me on his mom's couch
in West Virginia, Scott was the first person he called
while they were filming Supersize Me. Scott traveled with Morgan everywhere.
They were in the car together, they shared hotel rooms,
and Scott was always filming.
Speaker 8 (40:57):
And I can guarantee you that he was not drinking
during those times. I mean, I see he was in
the bathroom and he had a vial and he's swinging
it down. But you know, I didn't notice any kind
of change in his behavior or you know, his abilities
and whatnot. And to be perfectly honest, I don't, I
(41:18):
truly don't believe that he would break.
Speaker 11 (41:20):
His own rules.
Speaker 8 (41:21):
The rule was he could only consume something if it
came from McDonald's, and he did not break that rule,
and I was there and I know he didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Scott says that if Morgan was binge shrinking alone in
the bathroom or wherever, that would have been a hard
secret to keep from him, because Scott and Morgan were
close and Scott knew what Morgan was like after a
few drinks.
Speaker 8 (41:40):
There are moments in my life where I would hang
out with Morgan and I wish I didn't because the
next day was really important. Yeah, you know, it kind
of messed up a couple of important days from me.
Speaker 11 (41:52):
But we had fun, you know.
Speaker 8 (41:53):
I mean, you know, I was the guy with the
video camera in the nineties, and I always had a
video camera with me.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
When Scott and Morgan were making I Bet you Will,
they would get to their filming location, find the busiest
club or bar in town, and pass out flyers to
try to get contestants on the show, and they would
often stick around and party.
Speaker 8 (42:10):
I have all this footage of me and Morgan out
and a lot of it is, to be perfectly honest,
drunken camera stuff. And I've got some footage of Morgan
just completely trashed and just looking at the expression on
his face. And you know, back in the day, you're thinking, oh,
we're all just drinking, we're having good time. But now
looking at it with a different filter, you know.
Speaker 11 (42:32):
Yeah, I kind of do recognize that he had a problem.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
So if that's true, then what was really going on
with Morgan's liver and those test results? In the film,
we see one of his doctors telling Morgan that it's
likely a fatty liver disease, and according to Alex, the
official diagnosis was non alcoholics data appatitis, which is a
form of non alcoholic fatty liver disease. This is now
an extremely common diagnosis, but back in two thousand and three,
it wasn't that well understood. The conventional wisdom back then
(43:08):
was that liver damage is normally caused by alcohol abuse,
which is what you hear from the doctors. I spoke
with doctor Jeffrey Schumer. He's the founder and director of
the Fatty Liver Clinic at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego.
He's one of the top experts in the field, and
I should say he was not involved in the film
in any way. He explained that non alcoholic fatty liver
disease is largely genetic, but that diet also plays a role.
(43:31):
So if Morgan had the genetic predisposition, it's certainly possible
that this extreme diet was a factor in him developing
non alcoholic fatty liver disease, but it doesn't mean that
everyone who eats like this would have liver issues. Doctor
Schumer also said that those blood tests that Morgan takes
at the start of the film, they wouldn't have been
able to tell if Morgan had this genetic predisposition, and
they wouldn't have been able to give you a great
(43:52):
view into Morgan's liver chemistry. So in the film, the
story that Morgan lays out is that he consumed only
McDonald's and that's what caused these bad test results on
his liver. That's definitely possible, especially if he had this
genetic predisposition. Doctor Schumer stressed that, like so many issues
around health and nutrition and diet, it really depends on
the person and it's complicated, okay, on a chapter five
(44:21):
the legacy. When Supersized Me first came out twenty years ago,
one of the many people to see it was Emily Contois, Today,
she's an associate professor of Media Studies at the University
of Tulsa. She has a master's degree in public health
and has written a lot about gender, food, and body
image in media. Emily first supersized me in the theater
as a student at the University of Oklahoma. At the time,
(44:42):
she knew that she was interested in health and nutrition
issues that were getting a lot more attention across America
than ever before.
Speaker 10 (44:48):
So two thousand and three is the year that the
Surgeon General of the United States literally likens obesity to
the war on terror. He calls it the terror within
It is escalated to that extent that obesity is as
big of an issue as the War on terror, far
reloving nine to eleven. This is the first time that
it's called an epidemic being spoken about with the kinds
(45:11):
of language we typically use for like an infectious disease.
Right that's attacking US.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Governments and school districts began getting in on the fight.
In two thousand and three, California banned the sale of
soft drinks and grade schools. In two thousand and six,
all of the big beverage companies agreed to sell only small,
low calorie beverages in schools, and officials also turn their
attention to students.
Speaker 10 (45:29):
Arkansas is one of the first states to move to
a BMI report card in the public schools.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
BMI stands for body mass index and it's a calculation
based on your height and weight. It's supposed to measure
your body fat, and it's been used by doctors to
gauge risk factors and health, but it's been widely criticized
as inaccurate and not a great measure of a person's
overall health. Still, by twenty ten, millions of students were
receiving BMI report cards, and twenty nine states had policies
in place that encourage or required schools to waste students
(45:58):
or calculate their BMI so that as.
Speaker 10 (46:00):
A child gets their grades and they're sent home to
their parents to have conversations about their intellectual development, that
they would also be writ their BMI ranking as a
way to start converse within family about weight. And this
presumed need right to force little kids to lose weight.
And I cannot state strongly enough how bad of an
idea this was, but it was one that was absolutely
moved forward and at that moment where people really thought, right, like,
(46:23):
obesity is bad, we have to intervene, but there's nothing
worse we can do. They introduce all these food anxieties,
body anxieties right with children, like we have irrefutable evidence
that that causes poor relationships with eating, difficulties with weight,
you know, poor health outch items from yo yo dieting
or cycling through diets. That it can be much more
(46:44):
healthy to just focus on delicious fresh foods or you know,
focusing on learning how to cook or garden or something
like that, than ever focusing on weight.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
It's against this backdrop that Morgan is taking Supersize Me
to schools across the country doing talks and screenings. But
as I discussed with Emily, that backdrop today is very different.
So did you get a chance to watch Supersize Me again?
Speaker 3 (47:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 10 (47:05):
I watched it again with my husband. I watched it
together that first time, like twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Oh you watch it together back then? You watch it
together now?
Speaker 6 (47:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (47:12):
You know, what would you think?
Speaker 10 (47:14):
I didn't remember that. It's like the second shot in
the film that you have what fat activists themselves have
called the headless fatties. They were so common in news
reports about OBCD, and they are throughout this film in
multiple different moments.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
These are shots of crowds of people walking around, sometimes
in swimsuits on the beach with their stomachs showing, or
shots of people's thighs and hips and bellies. In the
film's intro these scenes are playing out with the song
Fat Bottom Girls as the soundtrack, and the shots are
just of people's bodies, either neck down or with their
faces blurt out.
Speaker 10 (47:49):
They do not have heads, they do not have faces,
they do not have eyes. These are people and they're
just being represented. Is these freakish objects right for us
to look at and to abhor their bodies?
Speaker 6 (48:01):
I don't think I knew what fat phobia was when
we made the movie. This is Alex again, and it
breaks my heart to think of any young people, especially
who watched the movie where there's definitely a couple scenes
where a fat body is made the butt of the joke,
(48:24):
and we were so wrong to do it that way.
And I think Morgan would agree. And I absolutely believe
that you can be healthy at any size. And I
wish I had known better, wish I could take that back.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
Despite these concerns, the film has been shown at health
class in schools for years, and it's still shown there
to this day. Before I talked with Emily, I asked
her if she could reach out to her recent students
to see if they'd watched Supersize Me in school. When
she pulled them, many said that they had, sometimes multiple times,
because their school would play the film year after year.
These students had plenty to say about it.
Speaker 10 (49:05):
The first bucket of their responses was that they were
really pursue waited by Spurlock's message about fast food consumption
being really bad for our health. They found that really worrisome,
and so a couple of them said, you know, it
really soured their views on fast food and they didn't
eat it again for years.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
There's a difference between parents and teachers telling you not
to eat McDonald's and seeing Morgan puke on the big screen.
So it did have that effect on some kids. And
in fact, in the year since the film came out,
those franchises made a lot of changes, adding healthier menu
options and posting calori accounts for customers. None of these
companies have ever said that the film was an influence
on their decision, but you can't deny the role of
super size me in the culture at the time. That said,
(49:44):
Emily tells me that some of her other undergrads had
different perspectives.
Speaker 10 (49:48):
Other students had really good health teachers, in my opinion
that they had more nuanced conversations about what might be
missing from the film and what its shortcomings would be.
But the one that touched my heart the most was
one student for whom you know, the fat stigma that
is so on the surface throughout the film really affected
her personally.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
The student saw the film in seventh grade health class.
She had experience of her teacher just putting the film
on one day with no context or discussion afterwards. Here's
what she wrote in her response.
Speaker 10 (50:16):
The movie did not help my self esteem in the slightest.
I was always a bigger kid, and this movie made
me feel even bigger. Overall, I hated this movie and
I would never show it to my students or to kids.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
In early twenty twenty three, Morgan Spurlock felt a pain
in his cheek. He went to a few dentists, then
some moorl surgeons, but he didn't get an official diagnosis
until three months later in June. He was cancer and
it was in stage three. He went through surgery and
radiation treatment, but then this past February the cancer returned.
Speaker 6 (50:50):
Cancer had spread everywhere, was in his lungs, was in
his brain. It was just, you know, so I had
to come over again and tell our kid, but it
has spread. I'm sorry, this is so it just happened,
(51:12):
you know. It's just so Haart. It's so wild to
be talking about Supersize me and remember him so vibrant
and healthy and excited, and he was always the most
energetic person in the realm. And to see him over
the course of a year just really with her and
diminish was heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
Morgan kept his cancer diagnosis private. He didn't even tell
close friends, so it was a shock to many people
to hear that he died this past May. Alex told
me that she really wanted people to know that Morgan
loved his kids, that he was a great father, even
during the hard times. She recalled a story from one
Halloween in particular with their son Liaken.
Speaker 6 (51:53):
So Lake, we asked, Lake, and what do you want
to be? And He's like cockroaches, Such a New York
City kid, right, It's like, I want to be cockroaches.
So Morgan had one of his friends who was like
a costume designer. May I wish we still had them.
They were easing cockroach costumes with little legs and they
were like easy to put on. It was so rad
(52:16):
and we walked around, the three of us and we
were cockroaches together. It was so cute. I mean, we
were not even together anymore, and we had the best
time that night.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
There was one more story. Alex wanted to tell me
about a story that she thinks Morgan would have loved
to hear.
Speaker 6 (52:32):
One of my good friends, she was one of the
few people I texted him and I was like, Hey,
you're going to see the announcement tomorrow. Morgan died today
and she was like are you are you ready? And
I was like, I bet you one hundred dollars. Within
the first twenty four hours, some Vegan reaches out to
(52:53):
me and says, do you think it was the McDonald's
that killed him? And it was like less than an hour.
I was like, twenty four hours and nope, Like within minutes,
people were like, oh wow, I'm sure it was that
McDonald's diet all those years ago that led to his death.
Make please, people come on cal him down. I know,
(53:15):
my goduck yeah, oh vegans, I'm an ex vegan. I
can say these things now.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Thanks to Alex Jamison, Sean Lawton, Scott and Brosie, doctor
Emily Contois, Hachi Chu Ku lux Eltrum, and doctor Jeffrey
Schwimmer for sharing their stories and expertise for this episode.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Thank you Senior producer Andre so'hara. Next week on the show,
I talked with the one and only Bobby flay Well
discuss how he got his start in food TV, why
he thinks TV chefs lose street cred, and what happened
when he called up the New York Times restaurant critic
after a bad review.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
That's next week.
Speaker 3 (53:55):
Meanwhile, if you want to hear more Sporkful episodes, check
out last week's show with Ed Gamble, comedian and co
host of the podcast Off Menu.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
That one's up now.
Speaker 3 (54:03):
And Hey, did you know you can listen to The
Sporkful and The Serious xm app?
Speaker 1 (54:06):
Yes, the Serious xm app.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over two hundred
AD free music channels curated by genre and era, plus
live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And
there's interviews with a list stars, and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music
app all rolled into one. Right now, Sportful listeners can
get three months free of the Serious XM app by
going to SiriusXM dot com slash spork full. This episode
(54:31):
was produced by me along with managment producer Imma Morgenstern and.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Senior producer Andres O'Hara.
Speaker 5 (54:36):
It was edited by Camille Stanley. Our engineer is Jared
O'Connell and our intern is Julia New Music help from
Black Label Music. The Sporkflow is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producers are Nora Richie and Colin Anderson. Until
Next Time, I'm Dan Pashmer and I'm Corey.
Speaker 6 (54:51):
I'm Jenny, and we're in New York City on our honeymoon.
Speaker 10 (54:54):
We just got done eating an excellent dinner at Antecha Maria,
and we're here to tell you to eat.
Speaker 13 (54:59):
More, eat better, and eat more better.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
That was Sporkfell's senior producer Andres O'Hara. If you're looking
for more Sporkful episodes to listen to, check out, their
episode is your recipe lying to you. An investigation into
all the ways recipes deceive you. Listen and follow this
sporkful wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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