The Real Price of a Big Mac

Sometimes inspiration strikes in the unlikeliest places. After gorging himself on Thanksgiving dinner in 2002, Morgan Spurlock was watching TV with his belt unbuckled and his pants unzipped. On the news was a report about two girls in New York who were suing McDonald's because, they claimed, the food made them overweight and sick. At one point in the report, recalls Spurlock, a representative for the fast-food chain claimed its food was, in fact, nutritious. It was at that precise moment that Spurlock, who runs his own production company, says "the bells went off." He decided to make a documentary--his first feature-length film--in which he would, in an attempt to explore why Americans are so fat, eat at McDonald's three times a day for 30 solid days.

One year, thousands of fries and tens of thousands of calories later, Spurlock has an award-winning film in the can. Titled, tongue planted firmly in cheek, "Super Size Me," his documentary was a surprise hit at Sundance last week, winning Spurlock the Best Director prize in the documentary competition and drawing comparisons to the work of "Bowling for Columbine" auteur Michael Moore. With regular visits to the doctor, interviews with experts on fast food and chats with regular folk on the road, the viewer gets a front-row seat as the formerly fit filmmaker eats everything on the menu, packing on the pounds, and looking--and feeling--worse in each successive frame. McDonald's' response? The home of the Happy Meal declined to comment in the film but has released statements saying that its menu offers an array of choices, some healthier than others. Spurlock, 33, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker about his wild, fattening trip since that moment of tryptophan-induced inspiration.

You ate three meals a day at McDonald's for 30 days for this film. What happened to your body over the course of that month?

My body just basically falls apart over the course of this diet. I start to get tired; I start to get headaches; my liver basically starts to fill up with fat because there's so much fat and sugar in this food. My blood sugar skyrockets, my cholesterol goes up off the charts, my blood pressure becomes completely unmanageable. The doctors were like "You have to stop."

You saw more than one doctor?

I was seeing three different doctors over the course of this, just so I would really have a fair balance between all the people so nobody could say "oh, it was doctor bias; it was physician bias." Each of these doctors was doing their own blood tests and each of the blood tests were going to three different labs so there was no way lab error could be an issue. Everything that happens to my body over the course of the film was caused by this diet. And everything that happened to my body was caused by this food that I got at this restaurant. I didn't eat anything--no gum, no candy, not even a Tic Tac--everything that I put in my mouth came from over the counter at McDonald's. Even the water. I wouldn't even drink water from outside, that way there would never be a question that "oh there was probably something in the water somewhere else when he was traveling around." I only drank bottled water from McDonald's.