Morgan Spurlock Watch

The Obesity "Crisis"

Spurlock writes:

The United States is the fattest nation on earth. Sixty-five percen of American adults are overweight; 30 percent are obese. According to the American Obesity Association, 127 million are overweight, 60 million Americans are obese and 9 million are "severely obese." In the decade between 1991 and 2001, obesity figures ballooned along with our own figures: from 12 percent of us being obese in 1991 to 21 percent in 2001. Almost double. In ten years. (p. 10)

It's important to note before debunking this that Americans have, on average, put on eight to ten extra pounds over the last 25 years. It's also important to note that in spite of that, we're healthier than we've ever been in the history of the country.

Now to the debunking. A huge part of the "ballooning" Spurlock speaks of has nothing to do with overeating. It's due to the fact that in 1998, the U.S. government redefined what it meant to be obese. The Centers for Disease Countrol lowered the bar. One magic night in 1998, then, 29 million Americans went to bed of "normal" weight, and woke up "overweight" -- without ever gaining a pound. Millions more went to bed "overweight," and woke up "obese." That's not the fault of McDonalds or Frito lay, or Baskin-Robins. It's the result of an alarmist government moving the goalposts to manufacture hysteria. My favorite quote comes from a Washington Post, written shortly after the decision...

"… 97 million adults -- nearly 55 percent of the U.S. population -- would be considered overweight, placing them at increased risk of such health problems as diabetes, elevated blood cholesterol, heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure."

Of course, none of these people's risk for these conditions increased overnight. The government merely drew a largely arbitrary line, and announced that one side of that line would now be healthy, and the other side wouldn't.

Of course, all of these statistics flow from the Body Mass Index, or BMI. BMI is by and large a completely arbitrary measure of health. It doesn't account for age, sex, gender, body type, or ethnicity. It also doesn't distinguish between fat tissue and muscle tissue (the latter is more dense). By now, you've probably heard about how big, muscle-bound athletes are classified as "obese" by the government. By BMI standards, more than half the NBA is obese or overweight. But in fact, any person who works out regularly is likely to fall into the "overweight" or "obese" categories. According to the government, for example, Johnny Depp is overweight. And Tom Cruise is obese. If your build is similar to theirs, you're probably obese or overweight, too (if you're wondering, the government considers me obsese, too -- here's a recent picture). Should give you an idea of how specious a tool the BMI really is.

Look at it this way: Muscle mass is denser than fat mass. If you've ever started a regular workout regimen after a few months of inactivity, you'll know that your weight tends to go up, not down, after the first few weeks. You're building muscle. Which means if ten people of normal build who don't exercise joined a gym, their collective BMI would go up, not down. But they'd be adding to the overweight-obesity statistics.

On it's own website, the Centers for Disease Control writes:

Two people can have the same BMI, but a different percent body fat. A bodybuilder with a large muscle mass and a low percent body fat may have the same BMI as a person who has more body fat because BMI is calculated using weight and height only.

[...]

This is a good reminder that BMI is only one piece of a person's health profile. It is important to talk with your doctor about other measures and risk factors. (e.g., waist circumference, smoking, physical activity level, and diet.)

The CDC's accompanying table shows a sketch of an obviously flabby man and obviously very fit man and admits that according to the government's method of calculating obesity, there is no difference between them. Remember, when people like S purlock say things like "127 million Americans are overweight," this is how they're arriving at those figures.

If the CDC advises against using BMI as the sole indicator of overall health on an individual level, why are we using BMI and only BMI to gauge the overall health of the nation? And why are people like Spurlock throwing these numbers around in an effort to influence public policy?

Spurlock mentions the American Obesity Association. For someone so skeptical of the motivations of corporations, I'm surprised he didn't do a bit more research on AOA.

Just last week, the Seattle Times ran a report on how and why the BMI was lowered in 1998. Guess who was behind it? the American Obesity Association. And a plethora of nutrition activists, drug companies, and professional scolds who had a stake in getting the government to call more of its citizens fat. Writes the Times:

In May 1995, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked 24 experts to write guidelines for diagnosing and treating obesity. The expert panel officially defined obesity as a BMI of 30 or higher, and overweight as a BMI above 25 and below 30. The panel, which included the pharmacologist who created the phen-fen combo, was criticized for its ties to the drug and weight-loss industries.

[...]

At the hearings, Interneuron presented data showing an obesity pandemic and said desperate measures were required to stop it from prematurely killing 300,000 Americans a year.

That controversial figure came from weight-loss experts and researchers who used epidemiological data from decades-old health studies to build the case that excess body fat was a crisis more urgent than even AIDS.

[...]

Also at the hearing was a newly formed group, the American Obesity Association, which built a case for treating obesity as a chronic disease. Funded largely by drug companies, including two involved with Redux, the association was headed by Dr. Richard Atkinson, an internist who advocated gastric bypass for severe obesity and who later founded a company to test for what he believed might be an "obesity virus."

At the hearing, the association positioned itself as a patient-advocacy organization, though it offered no patients to testify for the drug.

There is some evidence that extreme, morbid obesity is on the rise, though it still affects a realtively small percentage of the population. No one is advocating morbid obesity, here. But the idea that we as a nation putting on pounds, and spiraling toward a health care catastrophe just isn't supported by the facts. And when you read somewhere where it seems to be, odds are, the facts you're reading were manufactured and pushed by agents with a financial stake in promoting the hype, agents like the American Obesity Association. Even the Center for Science in the Public Interest, whom Spurlock consults thoughout the book and which is always eager to hype the obesity "threat," doubts the integrity of AOA. Center for Consumer Freedom (disclosure: a food industry-funded group) sheds light on AOA here.

NOTE: A commenter points out that my link to Tom Cruise pointed to a lookalike photo. Here's a picture of Tom Cruise. Not that it does much to undermine the point.

Spurlock's Contempt for Commerce

Spurlock writes:

In 2002, the retail industry in this country spent $13.5 billion telling us what to buy, and we must have been listening, because in 2003 we spent nearly $8 trillion on all kinds of crap. That's right, trillion. How insane is that? We are the biggest consuming culture on the planet. We buy almost twice as much crap as our nearest competitor, Japan. We spend more on ourselves than the entire gross national product of any nation in the world.

It's hard to know where to start on a passage like this. It comes from a position so averse to capitalism, progress, and commerce, I'm tempted to just shrug and blow it off. Of course, I won't.

Look, every one of those transactions that made up that $8 trillion Spurlock describes as "crap" was voluntary. Each party agreed to part with something in exchange for something else he valued more. The overwhelming majority of the time, each party got what he wanted, and walked away happier than he was before the transaction took place.

Why is this a bad thing? Why should we be ashamed of the fact that we've progressed to the point where there are millions of products available that in some way make our lives better? So, Spurlock says, some may actually make our lives worse. Fine. So avoid them. Don't buy stuff. Don't buy "crap." The rest of us will crap up our homes, our cars, our offices, and our wardrobes, and we'll be happier for it.

It's all fine and dandy to don the pretense of anti-materialism. But the simple fact of the matter is, our want of stuff, our pursuit of stuff, and the genius of our forebears to generally leave the market alone has made us the healthiest, most prosperous, most comfortable, least violent society in the history of mankind. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's something to relish. It's something to wish upon the rest of the world.

Not Spurlock. He writes:

What does all that consumption do for us? Does it make us happy? You tell me. If we were all so happy, would we be on so many drugs?

We're on "so many" drugs because "so many" drugs are available to us. Thanks to capitalism.

Live expectancy in the U.S. is at an all-time high. The three biggest killers -- heart disease, cancer, and stroke -- are all dropping dramatically. This is particularly heartening with cancer, which is dropping despite our ability to diagnose it earlier. To state without context that "lots of Americans are on drugs" means nothing. We're the healthiest we've ever been. Yes, even with fast food.

Spurlock goes on:

Antidepressant use in the U.S. nearly tripled in the past decade.

Again, this means very little. Antidepressant use has risen in part because of breakthrough drugs like Prozac and its "me too" followers have been so effective, and in part because the success of those drugs have gradually eroded the stigma against depression and mental illness, meaning more people are getting treatment, as opposed to suffering in silence or shame. These, again, are good developments.

Spurlock:

We've got drugs to counteract the disastrous effects of all our overconsumption--diet drugs, heart drugs, liver drugs, drug to make our hair grow back, and our willies stiff. In 2003, we Americans spent $227 billion on medications. That's a whole lot of drugs!

It's disingenuous to say many of those conditions are caused even in part by "overconsumption," much less exclusively. Many are genetic. Many are genetic predispositions triggered by environmental factors. Frankly, the idea that the people on these kinds of drugs somehow deserve the condition they're in because they're gluttounous or greedy is pretty damned offensive. Sure, some drugs may enable us to indulge bad habits without repercussions. So what? Even conceding that that's not a desirable development (and I don't), the vast majority of medical treatments are aimed at ailments no one "asked for."

And only the most rabid of anti-capitalists could find fault with the fact that we now have drugs available to treat the ailments that have plagued us for centuries. Only a smug socialist could consider, "are life-saving drugs a good or bad development?" a question up for debate (all, of course, while selling a movie, two books, and a TV show).

Spurlock goes on like this for another five paragraphs. He blames advertising for our "excessive" consumption, our (alleged) depression, and our general ennui. He concludes with this sweeping statement:

Yet none of the stuff we consume -- no matter how much bigger our SUV is than our neighbor's, no matter how many Whoppers we wolf down, no matter how many DVDs we own or how much Zoloft we take -- makes us feel full, or satisfied, or happy.

Bullshit. Tell me, would you be happier with or without your iPod? Do your sunglasses with UV protection make being outside better or worse for on eyes? Do you get more or less enjoyment from the added features producers sometimes add to DVDs? Are you better off with the quality and durability of a DVD picture, or with the grainier, less-lasting properties of VHS? Would you prefer to spend August in D.C. with or without air conditioning? In any case, even if you opt for the less efficient, less modern, less rational answer to any of these questions, that's fine. No one forces you to enjoy any of these conveniences. You may still live like a Luddite in America.

The funny thing is, people like Spurlock can only make silly arguments like these because capitalism has saved them from more dire concerns -- starving to death, for example. Or dying of malaria. Or struggling to make sure his kid lives past the age of ten. Or making sure he has enough meat cured to last until April. There are a few billion people around the world who still don't have the luxury to bitch about the overabundance of life-saving drugs, too many flavors of ketchup, or bemoan the fact that Viagra -- God forbid! -- lets old people continue to enjoy sex well into their eighties.

They don't bitch and moan about too many choices in the toothpaste aisle because they're busy trying not to starve to death.

Wanna' know why we don't have to worry about starving to death anymore? Because of capitalism. Free markets. Consumerism. Consumption.

Our responsibility is not to feel shame for our consumption. Our responsibility is to bring the beauty of markets and the miracle of "overconsumption" to the people who need it.

ACORN, Spurlock, and the Minimum Wage

According to a post at Daily Kos, the first episode of Spurlock's 30 Days was cosponsored by ACORN, the grassroots group agitating for a "living wage" in cities across the country. In the cities where they've been succesful, minimum wage has been hiked to $10 or more per hour.

If you'll remember, the premise of the show was that Spurlock and his girlfriend attempted to live on minimum wage for, again, thirty days. The purpose I guess was to document the struggles all the people who live on minimum wage endure to make ends meet. I'll get to critiques of this particular episode in subsequent posts.

For the moment, I'd like to look at ACORN's cosponsorship of that episode.

Longtime readers of my blog likely know where I'm going with this: ACORN is a blatantly hypocritical activist group. For years, ACORN has tried like hell to avoid paying its own members the minimum wage required by law! This, as those same employees were working to raise minimum wages for everyone else.

In fact, ACORN actually went to court to fight for its right to pay wages below the legal minimum. What's more, ACORN made the exact same arguments its opponents make when arguing aginst higher minimum wages -- namely, that paying higher wages would mean the company would have to make do with fewer employees.

In a suit ACORN filed to exempt itself from California's minimum wage laws, the organization wrote in its brief:

"As acknowledged both by the trial court and California, the more that ACORN must pay each individual outreach worker--either because of minimum wage or overtime requirements--the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire."

Straight from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce talking points! ACORN also has a history of union-busting, ducking overtime requirements, cutting late paychecks, and general anti-labor practices. In 2003, the National Labor Relations Board made the following findings about the organization:

• ACORN pays its field members $18,000 per year.
• Field members typically work 54+ hours per week.
• Field members are rarely given weekends off.
• Field members are expected to canvas neighborhoods alone, sometimes at night.
• ACORN is frequently tardy with member paychecks.

Check here for more damning evidence against ACORN (Disclosure: I'll note that the source of the previous link is the Employment Policies Institute, an organization funded by the restuarant industry. But the document is merely a data culling exercise. It's all public record).

What's funny is that Spurlock dismissed the "a higher minimum wage means fewer jobs" argument out of hand on the show. Yet it's an argument his activist allies and co-sponsors actually embraced when someone tried to make them ingest a bit of their own medicine.

If he's really serious about forcing employers to pay better wages, Spurlock might start with the allegedly pro-labor activist group that helped pay for his show.

Unfiction

Debbie Schlussel writes in the Wall Street Journal that Spurlock's 30 Days program isn't so much a documentary as a polemic. The gist of the episode Schulssel's refering to: A regular guy lives as a Muslim for thirty days, and grows sensitive to the plights of Muslims in America.

He's supposed to "learn" these lessons on his own. In truth, it seems the outcome is generally predetermined. Here's Schlussel:

I asked the show's executive producers--all of whom worked on "The Awful Truth With Michael Moore," a cable TV show--how this could be a documentary when they had decided the outcome in advance. Wasn't it possible that Mr. Stacy would come out seeing that there isn't Islamophobia to the extent that the Muslim community claims? Might he see that there is disturbingly strong support in the Detroit-area Islamic community for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah--a fact regularly documented even in the normally pliant Detroit media?

No, the producers told me. "Morgan wants the show to demonstrate to America that we are Islamophobic and that 9/11's biggest victims are Muslims."

The funny thing is, I probably side with Spurlock over Schussel on the broader debate here. But that doesn't excuse that the facts in these shows are selectively manipulated to engineer predetermined outcomes, and that they're still packaged as "documentaries."

I'd wager that each episode of Spurlock's show, though sold as a "documentary," will end with just as tidy a lesson.

Orange Devolution

Spurlock writes:

Once, I had the pleasure of seeing where Ronald's [McDonalds] orange juice comes from. It's delivered in a giant plastic sack of Day-Glo goo. One one side of it is a little tube they attach to the juice machine, then they roll the sack inside and close it up. The goo is mixed with water to deliver to you, the happy customer, a beverage that tastes a bit like orange juice and a bit like the inside of a garbage bag. (p. 136)

McDonalds orange juice is made by Minute Maid. Its ingredients?

Oranges.

That's it. No added sugar. No preservatives. Just juice from oranges.

The orange juice is concentrated to make it easier to ship and store. It's then remixed with water at the restaurant and served. It's no different than buying frozen orange juice concentrate at the grocery store, taking it home, mixing it with water, and drinking it.

Back to Aspartame

Continuing his assault on artificial sweeteners, Spurlock writes:

"There were far more troubling studies possibly linking aspartame to birth defects and brain tumors, one conducted by the FDA itself as early as 1981, but they were overlooked in the rush to get NutraSweet approved and marketed." (p. 98)

Spurlock again seems to have fallen for an urban legend.

Let's go back to one of Spurlock's own sources: the FDA Consumer newsletter. The issue Spurlock himself cites for another claim says the following:

FDA calls aspartame, sold under trade names such as NutraSweet and Equal, one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved. The agency says the more than 100 toxicological and clinical studies it has reviewed confirm that aspartame is safe for the general population.

Of course, Spurlock writes that the FDA "rushed" the sweetener to market, implying that the agency bowed to political pressure, in which case -- I guess -- we shouldn't believe what it writes.

Okay. Then how 'bout the British medical journal The Lancet? The American Council on Science and Health? MIT? Time magazine?

All of have considered the claims Spurlock publishes as fact, and thoroughly rebuked them as hysterical Internet scaremongering.

The most cursory of Internet research turned these articles up. In fact, a visit to Snopes would have sufficed to find them all. Instead, Spurlock cites the very sorts of quackish, alarmist websites the FDA, respected medical journals, academics, and other journalists caution anyone with a lick of sense from taking seriously.

He's that eager to demonize Big Food.

So what of that study that perported to link aspartame to brain tumors? It was conducted by a couple of Washington University researchers who apparently saw a 10% rise in incidence in brain tumors shortly after the sweetener was put on the U.S. market in the early 1980s. They didn't even check to see if the people who got brain tumors after 1983 had actually consumed any aspartame. Pure, speculative correlation. Bizarrely, they overlooked the fact that that rise was merely the tail end of a decade-long rise in brain cancer that began in the early 1970s -- well before aspartame hit the market. Beginning in the mid-1980s incidents of brain cancer began a decade-long leveling off -- with aspartame use on the rise all the while.

Spurlock, again, bites on an urban legend and Internet hoax. And one that, again, could have been disproven with as little effort as a Google search.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Mad Damned Lies

While again attacking the cattle industry, specifically its use of Bovine Growth Hormone [BGH], Spurlock writes:

It's because of the BGH that countries in the European Union won't let us export beef to them anymore; BGH is linked to mad-cow disease. (p. 102)

Short passage. Two huge errors.

First, nearly all the BGH used in the United States is synthetic. It never came from an actual cow. Which means it can't carry the misshapen protein (called a prion) that carries mad cow disease. That's only found in the nervous system of ruminants -- actual cows and sheep.

The only link between BGH and mad cow I could find anywhere was this one, in which a a consumer advocate theorized that cows on BGH grow quickly, and therefore need feed that's denser in energy and protein. This, the author concluded, means BGH cattle are more likely to get food that's made up of other ruminants, which puts that cattle at increased risk of mad cow.

Of course, even before 1997, that risk was still damn-near zero. And the whole point was rendered moot after 1997, when the FDA banned feed with ruminant remains for other ruminants.

Second, Spurlock himself goes on to write the following:

Originally discovered in the UK in 1986, the first case of mad cow in the United States wasn't documented until 2004 (in a cow raised in Canada and slaughtered in Washington state).

[...]

By the end of 2003, 143 official cases [of the human form of mad cow] had been counted in the UK, six in France, one each in Canada, Ireland, and Italy, and two in the United States--most recently, a Florida woman died of it in 2004, apparently after having eaten bad beef in the UK. (p. 102)

So to sum, Spurlock...

A) Questions the business practices of the U.S. beef industry,

B) does so by drawing a false link between bovine growth hormone and mad cow disease,

C) backs up his point by noting that Europe refuses to import U.S. beef, even though....

D) 153 of the 154 (99.3%) documented cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human form of mad cow) occured outside the United States, and 152 of the 154 occured in Europe.

A realist might also point out that these cases all occured over a period of time in which billions of pounds of beef were eaten the world over. Which means your risk of contracting the human form of mad cow from eating beef is virtually nil. And if you should contract it, there's a 99% chance didn't get the beef that gave it to you in the United States.

Somehow, Spurlock reaches into that bag of statistics and pulls out an indictment of U.S. beef.

Damn Close to Libel

While discussing how McDonalds' suppliers raise their cattle, Spurlock writes in Don't Eat This Book:

"Leftover bits and pieces [of dead cows] are scooped up, ground together and fed back to the cows. And then those cows are ground up and fed to you." (p. 102)

Actually, this process is called "ruminant feeding," and it has been banned by the FDA since 1997. Spurlock is accusing McDonalds of breaking federal law, and of continuing to break federal law for eight years.

This is a serious accusation, and one for which Spurlock provides no source. Either Spurlock or Putnam, his publisher, should provide an explanation as to how and why this accusation made it into the book.

Splenda

Spurlock writes:

“…sucralose [marketed as Splenda] has been linked in animal studies to shrinkage of the thymus glands and enlargement of the liver and kidneys. But as with NutraSweet, Splenda made it to the market before any large-scale, long-term population studies could prove or disprove those results.” (p. 98)

Sucralose was invented in 1976. It underwent more than 20 years of testing before getting FDA approval as Splenda in 1998. The "animal studies" Spurlock mentions involve animals fed enormous amounts of the stuff, amounts no sane person would approach in the course of a regular diet. That's why the FDA reviewed the studies Spurlock mentioned, and found no reason to keep the drug from the market. Here's what the FDA said upon approving the sweetener:

In determining the safety of sucralose, FDA reviewed data from more than 110 studies in humans and animals. Many of the studies were designed to identify possible toxic effects including carcinogenic, reproductive and neurological effects. No such effects were found, and FDA's approval is based on its finding that sucralose is safe for human consumption.

Splenda's been on the market in Canada for 14 years now, with no ill health effects.

An Unfair Shake

Spurlock writes:

“You ever notice they don’t call them “milkshakes” anymore? Someone once told me they had to stop that long ago, when they stopped making them like real milkshakes and started mass-producing them from chemicals. I guess calling them simply "shakes" sounded better than "chemshakes." That may just be an urban myth, but it's still a great story.” (p. 132)

Sneaky, isn't it? Spurlock words the passage so that he can plant the seed that McDonalds shakes are synthetic chemical goo without actually asserting so. He knows if he'd done the latter, he'd be baldly and provably wrong (though that doesn't seem to stop him elsewhere in the book). The "someone told me" crutch lets him publish a disparaging urban legend without taking any responsibility for its accuracy.

Yes, Spurlock, it is an urban legend. A quick Google search would have revealed as much. The primary ingredient in a McDonalds shake is "whole milk." The milk is powdered to make it longer lasting and easier to store. McDonalds stopped calling them "milkshakes" because it didn't want to mislead people into thinking the shakes were the old-fashioned variety made with ice cream. It's an act of corporate resonpsibility (truth in advertising) that one would think people like Spurlock would applaud. The method McDonalds uses for its shakes makes them cheaper and easier to prepare for busy customers than hand-dipping.

FYI, wanna' know the primary ingredient in McDonalds apple pie filling?

Apples!