The Sporkful Presents: How Did ‘Super Size Me’ End Up In Schools?

Pushkin.

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,

Please note this episode contains references to sexual abuse and disordered eating. All right, let's make some authentic sound effects here.

Mine's going to become a man right now. It's a little baby, a little baby in a can and then.

Oh man, fully sound effects. Eat your heart out.

We got a second career.

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.

Effects, how do I get that job?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm Dan Pashman.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doctors prescribed painkillers and antidepressants, but she didn't want to go down that path.

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.

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, and then she went further.

Took everything out gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, caffeine. First week was horrible. You feel worse before you feel better.

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 to breakfast. They started dating and Alex began learning about

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 most energetic person on the planet.

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 pursued acting for a few years, but it wasn't really working out, so he opened his own production company. This

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.

One of his projects was an online video series called I Bet You Will.

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.

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.

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.

I will pay you one hundred dollars cash to stuff this entire pizza into your pants.

Are you ready?

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.

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?

Oh?

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.

I think Morgan had discovered that even though he was gaining success with his MTV show, it wasn't really paying the bills.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Were you thinking of all the people I could have met?

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, and he was off.

Morgan got to work. The film starts off with Morgan consulting with three doctors to get a baseline of his health.

Your blood tests are excellent, your blood level's fine, your iron level is good as well.

You have no evileness or diabet. This your fostering, but sugars very low.

Your kidney function, your liver function, they were all perfect.

You don't smoke, I used to.

I don't any drug use at all, not for a long time. Any alcohol use now none.

Is there anything that we didn't cover? Is anything else you need to tell me?

Yeah, I don't think so.

Patient is embarking on a one month McDonald's binge.

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

Yeah, could I get the double quarter pounder with cheese meal?

I think I'm gonna have to go supersize.

On day two, Morgan gets his first supersize meal and he is pumped.

Look at that.

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.

But I'm just not even I'm not even halfway done with those fries.

I'm in half way.

Five minutes goes by, and then ten as he's pushing himself to finish the whole meal.

Oh, let's give me a minute.

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 more easily. Day five is his first weigh in with his dieticians. He started out weighing one hundred and eighty five pounds.

We had to stop everything.

I don't believe it.

One hundred and ninety five pounds pay.

He camped that we have to redo this.

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.

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.

I officially had to loosen my belt the other day from I had to lego a notch lower, not one notch.

Girlfriend Loving you.

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.

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.

He used to be.

I have to be on top.

Otherwise he uh, you know, he gets tired easily. I think the saturated fats are starting to impede the blood flow to his penis.

I didn't know if anybody was going to see this.

Alex told me that in the decades since the film came out, she's been asked about that scene a lot.

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.

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 weeks in things take a turn for the worse.

It's like two in the morning.

I yeah, I woke up.

I couldn't breathe.

It felt like I was having a heart palpitations.

He sees one of his doctors who doesn't really know why Morgan is experiencing these symptoms. The doctor seems worried.

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.

Okay, Morgan gets his full blood work done again. His cholesterol and his body fat are way up. But it's worse than that.

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.

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.

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 oldest brother, Craig. Craig is like, Morgan, people eat this crap their whole lives. I think another two weeks is

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.

Woo okay, oh yeah, oh boy, say two to.

Ten right on the money.

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.

I filed there.

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 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.

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 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.

Morgan when the Documentary Directing Award at Sundance, and just like that, it seemed like everybody wanted this film.

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 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.

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.

Of it.

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 on health and nutrition.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 and Eric Slusher had a love child, and that is

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.

I'm booking him. I haven't met him. I haven't seen the movie. So it's a lot of smoke and mirrors.

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?

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 brash duo going out there and saying, Hey, this is going to be the thing you need to bring to

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

All right back to the show. Senior producer Andre Sohara picks it up from here.

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

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.

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.

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.

In December of twenty seventeen, Sean had finished his move to Colorado and jumped on a flight back east for the holidays.

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 Spurlock story. And I was like, uh, oh, what's the Morgan Spurlock story.

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

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. Morgan was a very thoughtful, funny, organized guy. He told stories that felt very organic, but they were very well sculpted.

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 based on their looks. Sean Lawton had to drop Morgan as a client.

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.

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.

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

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,

You know, we see people who go on an alcohol binge and their numbers go up like crazy.

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.

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.

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.

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

I did after it was published.

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.

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 how he was living his life. You know, I saw him a couple times a month, always with our kid.

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, and is there anything you can say about that.

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.

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. Do you think it's possible that he could have been hiding a pattern of drinking from you in that time?

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 anybody before he published it, so I don't think he was in the best place, and I think if I

Scott is Scott and Brosi, the cinematographer and cameraman on Supersize Me. The only cameraman.

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.

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.

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 truly don't believe that he would break.

His own rules.

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.

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.

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.

But we had fun, you know.

I mean, you know, I was the guy with the video camera in the nineties, and I always had a video camera with me.

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.

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.

Yeah, I kind of do recognize that he had a problem.

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,

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 of language we typically use for like an infectious disease. Right that's attacking US.

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.

Arkansas is one of the first states to move to a BMI report card in the public schools.

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 or calculate their BMI so that as.

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.

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?

Yeah?

I watched it again with my husband. I watched it together that first time, like twenty years ago.

Oh you watch it together back then? You watch it together now?

Yeah?

You know, what would you think?

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.

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.

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?

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, 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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 and we walked around, the three of us and we

There was one more story. Alex wanted to tell me about a story that she thinks Morgan would have loved to hear.

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 me and says, do you think it was the McDonald's that killed him? And it was like less than an hour.

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.

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.

That's next week.

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.

That one's up now.

And Hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful and The Serious xm app?

Yes, the Serious xm app.

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Senior producer Andres O'Hara.

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.

I'm Jenny, and we're in New York City on our honeymoon.

We just got done eating an excellent dinner at Antecha Maria, and we're here to tell you to eat.

More, eat better, and eat more better.

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.