While examining the influence of the fast food industry, Morgan Spurlock personally explores the consequences on his health of a diet of solely McDonald’s food for one month.

Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me, came up with a great hook for his debut as a documentary filmmaker.
His experiment, to eat nothing but three McDonalds meals a day every day for 30 consecutive days, provides an entertaining and occasionally disturbing narrative thread that allows for informative and engaging tangents about American culture’s disturbing trend toward obesity.

Though the prose in his voice-overs occasionally reveals Spurlock’s amateurism, the editing and the quality of his interviews more than make up for it. Spurlock has absorbed the work of Michael Moore and manages to achieve the same intricate balance between laughter, shock, and information that makes Moore’s films entertaining, although Spurlock is without any righteous anger.

The film documents this lifestyle’s drastic effects on Spurlock’s physical and psychological well-being and explores the fast food industry’s corporate influence, including how it encourages poor nutrition for its own profit. During the filming, Spurlock dined at McDonald’s restaurants three times per day, sampling every item on the chain’s menu at least once. He consumed an average of 5,000 calories (the equivalent of 9.26 Big Macs) per day during the experiment. In February 2005, Super Size Me Educationally Enhanced DVD edition was released. It is an edited version of the film designed to be integrated into a high school health curriculum. MSNBC has also broadcast an hour long version of the film, in addition to the regular version.