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