Morgan Spurlock of "Supersized" fame: Genius or Jackass?

[SemiCharmedQuark]

I've heard both used to describe him. What is the DU opinion? I understand the importance of healthy eating, but the manner the experiment was carried out was pretty unscientific and skewed almost to a comical extent.

[Mojambo]

1. Somewhere in the middle

He is a clever guy with keen film-making ability.

We haven't heard the last of him.

[WindRavenX]

2. I thought he was great

Offered his body as a sacrifice to show just how shitty fast food is.
The guy nearly DIED.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

3. But it was an inaccurate test

Believe me, Im no friend of the fast food industry since I don't even eat meat. But the experiment is flawed. For one thing, he dramatically decreased the amount of excercise he was doing, so the ill effects had to factor that in. For another, even if you fried your own fries and made your own hamburgers in a McDonalds style, you would still have huge negative effects on your health, especially if you coupled it with a lack of exercise.
It would have been a more accurate test to continue his excercises as usual and substitute his meals for McDonalds. Then the negative effects would be based solely on his change in diet.

I think he's probably somewhere in the middle between genius and jackass. Probably "clever"

[WindRavenX]

4. the reason he stopped exercising is because...

...most Americans don't exercise. He did the average amount of walking that an American does per day. That was a valid point to make.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

5. No, because then he had two factors going into the experiment

There could have been two seperate experiments, 1 for the weight and adverse effects for just cutting down on exercise and 1 for eating fast food. Because negative effects will result just because he stopped exercising, the effects he is feeling are not the effects of fast food, but the effects of both.

He's a genius in that I could never think of something as clever as this experiment. But it could have been conducted more scientifically.

[WindRavenX]

6. I agree it may not be scientific...

But again, I think that it was important that he did it in the normal conditions that most Americans eat and live McDonald's; the way he was living, he could eat that shit and still be pretty healthy because he excersised a lot.

[sysoprock]

7. I vote jackass.

I don't need a 2 hour movie to tell me that if I eat nothing but Big Macs for a month straight I'm going to get sick as hell.

I'm thinking of making a movie where I don't take a shower for a whole year, and documenting the effect it has on my body odor.

I'll make millions.