Supersize Me

Supersize Me is the horrific story of a man who for thirty days tries to kill himself with McDonald's fastfood.

It's not a pretty film; his first Supersized meal, with a double cheeseburger, he pukes it all out. The camera glances outside to capture the steaming vomit.

The numbers are chilling. To give the documentary medical credibility, the filmmaker sees three doctors and a health nutritionist before embarking on his suicide binge. Blood pressure shot up from 120/80 to 150/90; cholesterol level from 165 to 230; weight from an optimum 185 to a gross 230. He suffered mood swings, depression, and (most painful of all, in my opinion) a drastically reduced sex life.

The bigger picture is even more sobering: the food industry spends 200 million to 1 billion per company to sell their sugar-rich, fat saturated products; the US government spends a measly 2 million dollars to promote a healthy vegetable and fruit-rich diet...

And you just have to see the people in the streets. One in four people who walk by in WalMart aren't just plump, but incredibly huge; some can't even walk properly any more. The final solution to extreme obesity is a gastric bypass, where the stomach is sliced up and tightened to 20% of its size...but who wants to go to that extreme measure (which works, by the way), when you can just cut down and exercise?

A fine horror story (funny too, in the Michael Moore populist tradition), and one of the most frightening films I've ever seen in recent years--and that includes dull music-video pretenders like 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake.