Most sensible people know that it’s unhealthy to eat McDonald’s food for every meal of every day. If you were forced to do this for one day, you’d probably realize that it would be unhealthy to do this for an entire month. Well, Morgan Spurlock decided to test this common-sense idea. That’s the focus of this documentary.

Throughout the film, his experiences are interspersed with comments from doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, and his extremely tolerant girlfriend. The actual story of his McDonald’s month is relatively unsurprising: it’s extremely unhealthy, and could be life-threatening. The secondary content, fortunately, is interesting and informative without just being common sense. The movie is absolutely hilarious, too – the sad part is that we were laughing about how stupid we all are. After seeing this, I’ll definitely do anything within reason to avoid fast food (and soda, and Sodexho) in the future.

My only gripe with the movie was that his experiment was not scientifically sound: he changed more than one critical variable. He previously ate a large amount of vegan food from his girlfriend, a vegan chef. And for the McDonald’s diet, he only exercised as much as the average American: walking approximately 2000 steps each day. His extreme health change could have been from any combination of the high meat and cheese proportions relative to his previous diet, the decrease in exercise, or the McDonald’s food for every meal. The experiment would have been more powerful if he would have at least maintained his previous exercise level.

Overall

I highly recommend this movie. It’s hilarious and educational. How often does that happen intentionally?