Revisionist History - The Sporkful Presents: How Did ‘Super Size Me’ End Up In Schools?

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

We're sharing an episode from the Sporkful podcast. In 2004, Morgan Spurlock released his low-budget documentary Super Size Me, and achieved success that most documentary filmmakers can only dream about. The film made millions at the box office, it was nominated for an Academy Award, and it turned Morgan into a star. To this day, the film is still shown in middle school and high school health classes across the country. But in 2017, Morgan made a shocking confession that derailed his career and called into question Super Size Me’s original claims. Last year, weeks after the film’s twentieth anniversary, Morgan died of cancer. The Sporkful looked into the legacy of Super Size Me. Sporkul senior producer Andres O’Hara talks with some of the people closest to Morgan to figure out: Who really was Morgan Spurlock? How did Super Size Me become such a huge hit? And after all these years, should we still be showing it to kids? Listen and Follow The Sporkful wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here. It's been a busy season at Revisionist History. Coming up next week, we're bringing you an argument on the American siren. Do they even save time when it comes to reaching emergencies? And what if we didn't have them at all? That's next week. Today, we're excited to share an episode from the podcast, The Sporkful, hosted by Dan Pashman. The Sporkful is not for foodies.

It's for eaters. And every week, they obsess about food to learn more about people, which is actually something we'll be exploring in a few weeks on Revisionist History with a special episode on the beloved nooks and crannies of Thomas's English Muffins. Stay tuned for that. But this episode of The Sporkful looks at the legacy of the documentary Supersize Me. The film started as a stunt. What would happen if Morgan Sporlock ate only McDonald's for 30 days? But this low-budget film became a nationwide hit and turned Morgan into a household name. Years later, at the peak of his career, Morgan published a confession that tanked his career

and called into question the results of the film. So what was really going on in Supersize Me? And why, after all these years, is it still being shown in schools? Here's Dan Pashman. Please note, this episode contains references to sexual abuse and disordered eating. All right, let's make some authentic sound effects here.

Mine's gonna become a man. Right now it's a little baby, little baby in a can, and then... Oh man, foley sound effects, eat your heart out. We got a second career coming. Ten years ago, I interviewed the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. At the time, in his Twitter bio, he called himself a Guinness-drinking West Virginia hillbilly. So I thought, let's chat over some Guinness. Imagine if your whole job was just to open and drink beer to make sound effects. How do I get that job?

But Morgan wasn't there just to talk about Guinness. He was promoting his new Showtime series, Seven Deadly Sins. Each episode was a story about a person who embodies one of those sins. The show leaned heavily on extremes, like extreme eating and the extreme ways people treat their bodies. Her goal was to become the fattest person in the world. Like she wanted to break the Guinness Book of World Record, and then once she hit 600 and some pounds, somewhere in there,

she had this like elevated sexuality within her body that she just wanted to explore and enjoy. I couldn't help but see the link between this project and Morgan's most famous film, Super Size Me. It's a documentary where Morgan himself goes to extremes, eating nothing but McDonald's for 30 days and monitoring how it affects his body. Morgan told me that for him, these extremes have a purpose.

I'm more interested in people thinking about the choices that we make and, you know, through something that is, I think, shocking or offensive. Super Size Me came out 20 years ago. When Morgan Spurlock released it, he achieved a status that most documentary filmmakers can only dream about. The film made millions at the box office. It was nominated for an Academy Award and it turned Morgan into a star.

And to this day, the film is still shown in middle school and high school health classes across America. Morgan went on to make more documentaries. It seemed like for a time, he was taking out some of the biggest cultural and social issues in this country. Then, one of the biggest cultural issues in America caught up with him when he made a shocking confession at the height of the Me Too movement. Part of that confession also had an impact on Super Size Me,

calling into question how real key parts of the film actually were. This past May, Morgan died of cancer. He was 53. Almost no one knew he was sick, and his death revealed just how much he had disappeared from public life since his confession. Today on the show, we're asking asking who really was Morgan Spurlock? What was it about Super Size Me that made it such a huge hit? And after all these years, should we still be showing it to kids? This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn

more about people. Today, we're bringing you the inside story of Super Size Me and a look at the film's legacy today, because it's a pretty epic and complicated story. Our senior producer, Andrzej Sohara, looked into it. I'm gonna tell you the story of Super Size Me in five chapters. We'll start with chapter one, the prologue. This chapter starts in a farmhouse outside of Portland, Oregon in the 1970s. That's where Alex Jamieson grew up. Her parents were, in her words, back to the land hippies. AMT – My mom had an organic gardening radio show for a decade. It was called Eve's Organic Garden.

And once a year I would go on the show and do a children's gardening corner and talk about growing strawberries or butterfly pollinating plants, things like that. Alex's family would harvest vegetables from the garden and barter for chickens and local honey from their neighbors. But eventually Alex went away for college and she ate like a lot of college students, plenty of junk food and sweets, not a whole lot of veggies. And she continued eating that way in her early 20s when she moved to New York and got her first big job. So I was a legal assistant and it was grueling work. And the first time I'd ever had a sit down, artificial lighting, 10 to 12 hour days, and I just started eating more sugar, more caffeine to get through the day.

And I started getting horrible migraines. Doctors prescribed painkillers and antidepressants, but she didn't want to go down that path. So I found another doctor that, you know, had a Buddha and ferns in his office. And he actually asked me, like, what I was eating. This doctor suggested that Alex make some changes to her diet. And when Alex got this advice, it was her light bulb moment. The idea that what you eat can affect your health in all kinds of different ways. So she went to the library and dove into books about health and nutrition.

This was in the 90s, pre-Google. Within a few weeks, she radically changed her diet. She went vegan. And then she went further. Took everything out. Gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, caffeine. First week was horrible. You feel worse before you feel better. Right.

Six months after making these changes, Alex left her job at the law firm and enrolled at the Natural Gourmet Institute, a cooking school in New York. At night, she worked as a cocktail waitress. One night, while working at the bar, she met a guy named Morgan Spurlock, and they started flirting. The next week, he came to the bar when Alex's shift ended, at 4 a.m., and he took her out

to breakfast. They started dating, and Alex began learning about Morgan's life. Morgan grew up in Beckley, West Virginia. His mother was a public school teacher, and his dad owned a tool machine shop. Morgan was the youngest of three boys. And he and his older brothers, growing up in Beckley, were all ballet dancers. His eldest brother, Craig, actually went professional.

I just think it's so cool that their parents were supportive of that to be ballerinos. Yeah. And, you know, Morgan also really got into student government. I mean, the most energetic person on the planet. At the time, Morgan had two very different ideas about what he wanted to do with his life. One idea came from that student government side.

He wanted to go to West Point and join the army and then become a politician. But Morgan didn't get into West Point, so he pursued a second idea, acting. He ended up at the film program at New York University. After graduating, he pursued acting for a few years, but it wasn't really working out. So he opened his own production company. This is when he and Alex started dating. He was 30 and she was 25. I was like, so what do you do for a living? He's like, I'm a producer. And I was like,

what does that mean? He's like, I make things happen. I was like, oh my god, please never say that to anyone ever again. That's disgusting. And he thought that was hilarious. One of his projects was an online video series called I Bet You Will. He would say this himself. He's like, it was just the dumbest ideas. It's what you would do in high school with your friends. Like, I'll give you $5 if you'll eat, you know, three sandwiches in less than five minutes. You know, just betting people to do stupid stuff for money. Getting people to do stupid stuff for money,

it wasn't exactly a new concept, but it was a hot idea at the time. And the show got acquired by MTV. He got a bigger budget going down to the Jersey Shore for spring break and crowds of teenagers you know, betting each other to do things. It was ridiculous. I will pay you $100 cash to stuff this entire pizza into your pants. Are you ready?

Yeah. She's gonna go for it. I will give you $400 cash to put on the I Bet You Will thong. You will jump rope while we spray you with milk right here. We have if it's I Bet You Will mealworms, those are nice right? And of course the world famous I Bet You Will Madagascar Hittin' Cockroaches. Yeah in that last one he's challenging a contestant to put cockroaches and mealworms down her pants. Let's get a roach in there.

There you go, buddy. Do you think at the time, like, was he happy? Was he excited about this? Oh, he was over the moon. He was so excited. At the same time, he was broke. We were both broke. He loved that I was in culinary school because I would bring all the leftovers from school and feed the office. And he was actually living in the office at that point

because he couldn't afford an apartment for at least a year, I think. Peter T. Leeson Morgan had discovered that even though he was gaining success with his MTV show, it wasn't really paying the bills. Beth Dombkowski He was like paying employees with credit cards. He was like going and doing like man with a van jobs on Craigslist. He would work a full day in the production office and then go, you know, lift shit for other people for like 40 bucks just so he could like buy Metro cards for his staff. Like he really, really was the hardest worker. After two seasons, I bet you will didn't get renewed.

But Morgan had made some money from the show, and he had to figure out what to do next. He was in a lot of debt at the time, somewhere between $60,000 and $70,000. So one option would be to use that money to pay down that debt. Instead, he decided to ignore it for a little while longer and find his next project.

["The Idea"] while longer and find his next project. Chapter 2, The Idea. In 2002, Morgan and Alex were in West Virginia for Thanksgiving with Morgan's family. We were on his mom's couch and we were watching the news and there was this story about two teenage girls in New York City who were suing McDonald's. The two girls who live in the Bronx were suing McDonald's for damages related to obesity. They argued that McDonald's was responsible for their adverse health outcomes because it didn't tell customers about the health risks of its food.

As the new story continued, a spokesperson for McDonald's came on. He said that you can't link McDonald's to obesity at all, because their food was healthy and nutritious. And he was like, well, what would happen if I just ate nothing about McDonald's for a month? And I was like, please don't do that. And he was like, wait a minute, that's a great, like, that's literally what happened. We had a fight on the couch and I was like, please don't do this. And so were you thinking, like, of all the people I could have met?

Well you know I was in love with him and he was a goofball and Morgan's attitude was well if I feel like crap it'll be a good movie and if nothing happens to me it'll be a great advertisement for McDonald's and I'll see if they'll want to buy it. I was like oh my my God, dude, okay, go ahead. And he was off. Morgan Got to Work The film starts off with Morgan consulting with three doctors to get a baseline of his health.

Your blood tests are excellent. Your blood level's fine. Your iron level is good as well. You have no illness of diabetes. You're fasting diabetes. three doctors to get a baseline of his health. Now, none. Is there anything we didn't cover? Is there anything else you need to tell me? I don't think so. Patient is embarking on a one-month McDonald's binge. As he sets off, Morgan creates rules for this experiment. He has to adopt the lifestyle of an average American, so he stops exercising, and he even cuts back on the amount that he walks. He'll only consume food and drink sold at McDonald's, nothing else. And if he's asked if he wants to supersize a meal, he has to say yes. The whole thing, it feels sort of scientific with the rules and the doctors and the blood tests, but you also see the Morgan of I Bet You Will, the one who wants

to go to extremes and have a lot of fun doing it. Hello, can I help you? Yeah, could I get the double quarter pounder with cheese meal? Marker's supersized. I think I'm gonna have to go supersized. On day two, Morgan gets his first supersized meal, and he is pumped. Look at that.

Look at how big that thing is. Look how big that french fry is. But then, as he starts eating, Morgan's enthusiasm drops. But I'm just not even, I'm not even halfway done with those fries. I'm not even halfway. Five minutes goes by and then 10, as he's pushing himself to finish the whole meal.

Let's give me a minute. He's in his car eating in the McDonald's parking lot, and suddenly he leans out the window and pukes. The camera then goes over his shoulder, and you can see the mess that Morgan's made on the pavement. But Morgan doesn't quit. After day three, his body seems to adapt to his new diet, and he's putting away McDonald's much more easily.

Day five is his first weigh-in with his dietitians. He started out weighing 185 pounds. We have to stop everything. I don't believe it. 195 pounds. It can't be, though. We have to redo this. You're going to gain actually about 5% of your body weight.

Losing weight that fast and gaining weight that fast is not healthy. After 10 days, Morgan's gained nearly 10% of his body weight, 17 pounds. He's also getting headaches, feeling depressed and sluggish. At times, he's eating 5,000 calories a day. I officially had to loosen my belt the other day from... I had to go a notch lower. One notch? One notch.

Yeah. His girlfriend has been loving you. She hates me. Morgan's girlfriend, of course, is Alex is loving you. She hates me. Morgan's girlfriend, of course, is Alex, who you've been hearing from. She's introduced as Morgan's girlfriend and vegan chef, but she also worked with Morgan behind the scenes on the film. Alex connected Morgan with nutrition experts and got Morgan to look into school lunch programs for the film.

In one notable scene, she appears on camera to talk about what Morgan's supersized diet has been like for her. It's hard for me to watch him go through this. He's exhausted by the end of the day. Just so tired. Gets home really late from work. And, you know, he gets all jacked up on sugar and caffeine and then he crashes. And then when we do have sex, I gotta tell ya,

he's not quite as energetic as he used to be. I have to be on top. Otherwise, he, you know, he gets tired easily. I think the saturated fats are starting to impede the blood flow to his penis. I didn't know if anybody was going to see this. Alex told me that in the decades since the film came out, she's been asked about that scene a lot. If I had known I'd be sitting next to my grandmother in a movie theater watching this scene,

I wouldn't have said it, but I'm glad I did. Alex believed in the message of the film, even if she didn't always love Morgan's tactics. At the time, she was working as a personal chef, and some of her clients were people dealing with serious illnesses. For Alex, this scene showed how a poor diet can affect all parts of your life, not just the most obvious ones. Anyway, up to this point in the film, Morgan's powering through, and it seems like he's having fun.

But about two weeks in, things take a turn for the worse. It's, um, it's like two in the morning. I, uh, I woke up, couldn't breathe. Felt like I was having, uh, heart palpitations. He sees one of his doctors, who doesn't really know why Morgan is experiencing these symptoms. The doctor seems worried. If the pain starts to radiate to your jaw or down your arm, that's life-threatening and immediately so.

So I need to hear about that or you need to call 911. Morgan gets his full blood work done again. His cholesterol and his body fat are way up. But it's worse than that. For the first time we're seeing uric acid elevated. So you're giving yourself hyperuricemia. And the danger of hyperuricemia is gout, kidney stones. The results for your liver are obscene beyond anything I would have thought.

You're sick and you're making yourself sick, and you can make yourself unsick by stopping doing what you're doing. Suddenly, this fun, goofy stunt gets very serious, and you can see Morgan, right in the middle of this experiment, reckoned with the fact that he might have done some real damage to his body. And he doesn't know what's going to happen if he keeps going. I was terrified. I was like, dude, stop. You've proven your point. You've done it. Please stop.

Like, it's gotten so bad so quickly, imagine what another two weeks will do to you. And he loved to tell this story about how he called all his friends and he talked to all the doctors and me and everybody saying, stop. And then he talked to Craig, who is one of my favorite people on earth, his oldest brother Craig. Craig was like, Morgan, people eat this crap their whole lives. Think another two weeks is going to kill you. And where he's like, great, I'm going to keep going. And, great, I'm gonna keep going. And spoiler alert, I guess, Morgan survives. He keeps up his McDonald's diet

and he goes back to the dieticians for one final way in at the end of the 30 days. He marches to the scale wearing only a tiny Speedo with an image of the American flag on it. Woohoo! Okay. Oh yeah. Oh boy. Oh boy.

210 pounds. I'm gonna say 210, right on the money. In only 30 days of eating nothing but McDonald's, I gained 24 and a half pounds. My liver turned to fat, and my cholesterol shot up 65 points. My body fat percentage went from 11 to 18%. I nearly doubled my risk of coronary heart disease,

making myself twice as likely to have heart failure. The movie ends with Alex taking control. She puts Morgan on a vegan, high-fiber diet. After six weeks, his cholesterol and liver functions go back to normal. It then takes him five months to lose 20 pounds. Chapter Three, a supersized success. Jones. Chapter 3. A Super-sized success.

Morgan finished the film at the end of 2003, and then things started happening very quickly. Super-size Me was selected for the Sundance Film Festival, so Morgan and Alex flew out to Utah for the premiere. The screening room was packed, and then the movie started playing. There's like Morgan talking to the camera like, I'm ready, supersize me. And then the Queen song starts right, Fat Bottom Girls was opening the movie and like the crowd erupted into applause and cheers and I was like that's not normal, that's not normal, this is Sundance. And Morgan and I was like, that's not normal, that's not normal, this is Sundance. And Morgan and I were standing, standing room only, we were in the back of the theater,

we ran out to the lobby and we were just like, oh my God, like, people might actually like this, like I think this is going to happen. Matthew Feeney Morgan won the Documentary Directing Award at Sundance. And just like that, it seemed like everybody wanted this film. Beth Dombkowski And then we went to over 20 countries in the next year, going to film festivals around the world. And that was the first and only time I ever flew first class.

Like we got put in the best hotels, we went to Australia for like three different film festivals. I mean, I can never go back to Australia because I flew there there first class, and I think that's probably a really rough trip if you're not in the big fancy seats. So it was just really fun. It was an amazing opportunity. Super Size Me, which had a $65,000 budget, grossed $22 million.

It was a huge figure for a documentary. It was even nominated for an Oscar. Morgan Spurlock became a household name, and the film became sort of a shorthand. Even if you didn't see it, you knew the gist of it. This guy ate nothing but McDonald's for a month, and he got really sick. Six weeks after the film was released, McDonald's discontinued its Super Size menu. The company said that at the time, the film didn't affect their decision.

Alex was also getting a lot of attention. She set up a website and posted some of the recipes that were featured in the movie. Once the film came out, she received thousands of messages from people who wanted her advice on health and nutrition. And we were just both really honored and excited that I was getting to talk about food and health with people all around the world and he was getting to do film and TV. We both got book deals out of it. Morgan's next project got greenlit to do another show.

Like, just so much was happening so quickly. I was like, wow, I guess I should start a health coaching business. Like, okay. So, that was the next 10 years for me. So, it was, yeah, it was a happy time. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING." That was the next 10 years for me. So it was, yeah, it was a happy time. While Morgan was at Sundance celebrating his success across the country in Washington, DC, Sean Lawton was looking for his next big client.

Sean was a speaking agent. He booked speakers for universities. That was his market. My buyers are 18 to 22 year olds who somehow are in charge of enormous amounts of money and they get to decide who comes to their school. Around 2002, 2003, we started to see Michael Moore and Eric Schlosser. Those guys just got booked everywhere.

Eric Schlosser was the author of Fast Food Nation, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. It came out in 2001. The next year, Michael Moore released his hit documentary about gun violence, Bowling for Columbine. I mean, they were doing universities everywhere you turned. The problem was I didn't represent either one of those. And so you're like, okay, I'm going to find the next thing.

And my then girlfriend showed me a news article and said, hey, read this. And it was just a short blurb about Super Size Me and the reception that it got. And I read it, and I'm like, oh my god, Michael Moore and Eric Schlosser had a love child, and that is going to be my next speaker. And I came into the office that day,

and I told my assistant, I said, you have one job today. Find me Morgan Spurlock. Sean got Morgan on the phone while he was still at Sundance. A week later, Sean signed Morgan as his client and got to work booking him at universities. I'm booking him. I haven't met him. I haven't seen the movie. So it's a lot of smoke and mirrors.

You booked him without meeting him and without seeing the movie? Yes. What made you feel like, I can actually take the risk and book this guy without having met him and without seeing the thing that everyone's talking about? It was just, it was an irresistible hook. Man eats 30 days of McDonald's and lives to talk about it. Truthfully, the movie's success was somewhat irrelevant

because it wasn't the movie, ultimately it was Morgan because he was this bigger than life personality. He was such a confident guy and I was a little arrogant myself. So, we were, you know, a pretty brash duo going out there and saying, hey, this is going to be the thing you need to bring to your campus. And within our first year, our first 12 months, we booked 72 speaking engagements at universities. These talks were lucrative for Morgan. In 2004, his fee started at $7,500 per talk. The next year, that fee doubled. Morgan spoke in packed campus auditoriums across the country about the Super Size Me story.

And after his first year on the road, more and more schools wanted him. What was really surprising to me was the staying power of Super Size Me. Okay, here's a movie that comes out in 2004, it's on home video. By, you know, 2006, 2007, you would think, okay, that movie has had its run. Morgan had also moved on. In 2005, he launched the series 30 Days on FX, where he attempted to live a totally different life for a month. In 2008, he got a little more ambitious

and made a film where he tried to track down Osama bin Laden. But Sean says wherever Morgan went to speak, everyone wanted to hear about Super Size Me. Sean and Morgan knew how to capitalize on that interest, even in places where the film might have gotten them in a little trouble. I remember getting contracts from, especially from some religious schools, that would, you know, have morality clauses in them about the language. And, you know, if the morality clauses were breached, they wouldn't pay. First thing I thought was, okay, we've got

a scene here with Morgan's naked buttocks, and we've got a couple of F words. Southern Methodist University might not be ready for this. Next thing you know, Morgan had a family-friendly cut of the movie made that he could take out to schools with religious affiliations or eventually high schools and secondary schools. Creating this PG version of the film was a crucial decision that helps explain the film's staying power and how it ended up being taught in health classes across the country to this day. At the time, Morgan was also being asked to speak in middle schools and high schools. And when he gave these talks, he brought a copy of this school-friendly version of Super Size Me. He mostly got positive encouraging responses from parents and teachers, but not always.

I remember vividly a woman standing up and she was like, I appreciate you coming here. I loved the movie. I loved your story. I'm a single mom. I've got three kids. Child support is not cutting it. You know, I got to work these jobs.

I got to, you know, I have child care in limited capacity. What am I supposed to do? The mother said that she often picked up McDonald's for her kids. It was a fast and inexpensive way to get dinner on the table. And now here's this film telling her that this is actually a terrible choice. And that was one of the few times Morgan didn't have a good comeback. And that was one of the things that I think kind of stuck with him through the Super Size Me cycle is, okay, here I did open Pandora's box.

You know, Now what? And I think one of the things that he was going to eventually try to unravel was Super Size Me 2, which was, what would it look like if we reinvented the fast food model? Coming up, 13 years after the premiere of Super Size Me, Morgan launches his next big project, a sequel. But just as the film is about to be released, he does something that brings his whole career crashing down. Stick around.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share. Um, Gilbert King? I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.

Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed. I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Bone Valley Season 2. Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. All right, back to the show. Senior producer Andre Sohara picks it up from here. Okay, on to Chapter Four, Part of the Problem. In the years after Morgan Spurlock released Supersize Me, while Morgan was touring the

country, talking about his film, and making other documentaries, fast food companies went on a marketing blitz to convince the public that their food was fresher, cleaner, and healthier. And in fact, some of those companies wanted to recruit Morgan in their campaigns. In 2016, an ad agency reached out to him. The idea was to create a fake documentary where he investigates Hardee's and Carl's Jr. and then discovers, to his utmost surprise, that they're actually really healthy. Morgan never took the job, but that pitch gave him his next big idea.

What if he started his own fast food restaurant? That's the premise of Super Size Me 2, Holy Chicken. Morgan sets out to create a fast food restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, called Holy Chicken, to see if he can make fast food that's actually good for you. He decides to raise his own chickens for the restaurant, but when he does that,

he confronts the dark world of factory farming, where animals bred for meat are getting sick and dropping dead, and small farmers who are deeply in debt to giant meat companies are terrified of speaking out. The film has Morgan Spurlock's special sauce. It's gruesome and infuriating, while still being funny and captivating. Supersize Me Too premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September of 2017, where

it was acquired by YouTube for $3.5 million. The film was set to be released in theaters in early 2018. Morgan was still working with Sean Laudin, his speaking agent, and they had big plans for the release. I was excited about going back and a little bit like getting the band back together. I was going to be taking this out to colleges who don't even remember the first SuperSize Me.

Sean was also making big changes in his own life. After working at the same place for 20 years, Sean made the jump to a new agency in Colorado, which would be a big step up for him. He'd be taking his clients with him, and Morgan was a big draw for this new agency. Sean and his wife had just had a baby, and now they were moving across the country to start a new life in Colorado. With the movie On the Horizon, you know, Morgan was in a really good place, I was in a really good place. There was a lot of excitement. We were both, We were both somewhat giddy about what the future held.

In December of 2017, Sean had finished his move to Colorado and jumped on a flight back east for the holidays. And I was on the plane and I landed at Reagan Airport and as soon as I turned my phone on, my notifications lit up in a way that I don't know that I've ever seen them before or since. I mean, I knew something was wrong. I thought something terrible had happened to my family. But then as I started opening emails and text messages, it was journalists. And they were all like, do you have a comment on the Morgan Spurlock story? I was like, uh-oh. What's the Morgan Spurlock story?

At the height of Me Too, Morgan had written a letter and posted it online. It was titled, I Am Part of the Problem. In it, he describes an experience in college where he had a one-night stand with a woman, one that she later described as rape. He confessed to paying a settlement to another woman who worked for his company for sexual harassment. He admitted to infidelity and belittling and demeaning women in his office. He said he'd been an alcoholic for decades,

and that alcohol had been a way to cope with his depression. And he also said that he'd been sexually abused as a child. Near the end of the letter, he writes, I am part of the problem. We all are. But I am also part of the solution. By recognizing and openly admitting what I've done to further this terrible situation, I hope to empower the change within myself. We should all find the courage to admit we're at fault."

I remember thinking, this is really bad. This is not going to go well. So the first thing I did, I hadn't even gotten home yet and I called Morgan. And he was not himself. And I think he was just starting to come to grips with the fact of what he had done. And it was very clear that the reaction he was expecting was not the reaction he got. Morgan was a very thoughtful, funny, organized guy. He told stories that felt very organic, but they were very well sculpted. And this was a meandering, poorly written diatribe

that conflated things that had nothing to do with the other thing. And it was just a mess. And the first thing I thought was he was probably under the influence when he wrote this, and I don't think he had any idea what was about to happen. Literally, the day that he posted that, every business partner, every client, every brand deal, everybody left. I mean, it was rapid.

It was sudden. It was complete. I mean, he did not have many people left in his orbit. YouTube pulled out of the deal for Super Size Me 2. The film was dropped from Sundance, and Morgan stepped down from his production company, Warrior Poets. Five days later, Jezebel published a from his production company, Warrior Poets. Five days later, Jezebel published a story about the culture at Warrior Poets.

Seven women who were former employees described a fratty boys club culture where nude paintings were hung on the wall, alcohol was pushed on employees, and women were frequently commented on based on their looks. Sean Lawton had to drop Morgan as a client. And I remember calling the head of the agency that I just moved to and I said, hey, I got some news. And I remember it was the first time that I realized that I was in a lot of trouble. A few months into that relationship, they did terminate my contract.

After Morgan published his letter, he briefly checked into a rehab facility. A month later, Sean was in New York and wanted to meet with Morgan for the first time since they'd parted ways. I texted him, I said, hey, let's meet at a diner, let's talk. And I remember he came in and it was like looking at a ghost. You know, it was the first time I'd seen him clean shaven, you know, the trademark mustache was gone, you know, his hair was thinning, the eyes were sunken.

He just looked like somebody who was still in shock even after, I guess at that point it had probably been about six weeks. We talked a lot about his sobriety and how important that was to him. And even then I was trying to let him know that, you know, this is not going to be easy. I can't speak to, you know, the experience of his victims and I think that should be the first thought. And I think one of the things that in our later years and later conversations that always rubbed him the wrong way is there were people who didn't ever apologize, they didn't take ownership of it, and they didn't wind up getting canceled.

They still got endorsements, they still got to do deals, they still got to be out in the public and he never got that opportunity and he felt like, but I confessed, I apologized. Why didn't I get the same grace? He was always looking for that fast forward button. It's like, how do we skip this part? And I'm like, you can't skip this part. I said, you're going to have to go through this and you don't get to decide how long that's going to take. And that was the one thing that, you know, we probably had maybe three or four conversations over the years after that. And, you know, every time it always

started with, hey, can you bring me back as a client? You know, I really want to go out there and I want to do speaking again. You know, I really love it. And I'm like, look, you're one of the best speakers I've ever worked with. You've been a great friend. You were a huge part of my early career. You put me on the map as a speaking agent. But, I mean, we don't live in a world right now where we can just act like this didn't happen. I mean, you confess to some bad things. And he was like, what else do I have to do? And I'm like, that's not for me to decide. But you have not healed yourself enough to be able to go out and resume your work.

And that was the one thing that I just don't know if it ever got through to him. Morgan's confession didn't just topple his career, it also called into question his most famous work, Super Size Me. That's because in his letter, he wrote, quote, I haven't been sober for more than a week in 30 years. If that was true, it meant that while Morgan was filming Super Size Me, while he was telling people that he was consuming nothing but McDonald's, he'd actually been drinking. A lot. If you look at the film in that light, then those scenes with the doctors, where he gets

all those bad test results, they look really different. Because in the film, his doctors aren't just worried about the test results. They also seem baffled by them. They say that issues like these aren't usually associated with eating fatty foods. They're more often caused by something else. You know, we see people who go on an alcohol binge and their numbers go up like crazy. That movie, Death in Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage, I mean that pickled his liver during the course of a few weeks in Las Vegas.

The movie's actually called Leaving Las Vegas, and in it, Nicolas Cage plays an alcoholic who takes a trip to Vegas to drink himself to death. That's the kind of thing the doctors say would lead to the test results Morgan was getting in Super Size Me. I would never have thought that you could do the same thing with a high-fat diet. If you were an alcoholic, I'd say you're going to die. You keep drinking, you'll die. And in the time since the movie came out, there have been more reasons to question it.

In 2006, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Linköping in Sweden attempted to replicate the SuperSizeMe results with a handful of college students. After 30 days of clocking 6,000 calories a day, all from fast food, the students did see a jump in their weight between 5 and 15 percent, but those changes to their liver were nothing close to what Morgan reported in his film. Morgan's obituary in the New York Times cites his 2017 confession. The obituary in the New York Times cites his 2017 confession. The obit says, quote,

in addition to his McDonald's only diet, he was drinking, a fact that he concealed from his doctors and the audience and that most likely skewed his results. These days, if you look up Super Size Me online, you'll find videos and social media posts and Reddit threads of people saying that Morgan Spurlock was a liar,

that he faked the results of Super Size Me. He published this letter online in 2017. Did you read that letter? I did after it was published. This is Alex Jameson again. Morgan and Alex were not together at the time of this letter. In 2006, Morgan and Alex got married and had a son together. They divorced a few years later.

Alex found out about the letter through her sister. She's like, did you see Morgan's article? I was like, what? No, like, so that whole week is a blur. But yes, the letter, the letter had huge ramifications. We hadn't lived together in years, so I wasn't privy to how he was living his life. You know, I saw him a couple times a month, always with our kid. Matthew 5.30

Alex told me that she wouldn't talk about the specifics of the letter, about any of what Morgan confessed to, except for one thing. A lot of people took that letter and then made inferences about the film, Super Size Me. And the big takeaway they got was that Morgan must have been drinking during the filming and he was hiding it. And is there anything you can say about that? He was not. Yes, Morgan drank alcohol throughout his life, but he had stopped drinking a month before

completely. Wasn't drinking during, wasn't drinking after, because he was like, I don't want booze to impact anything. So, he was like super clean. Yeah. I'll just ask one more question about that, which is that in the letter he says, quote, "'I haven't been sober for more than a week in 30 years.'" And he went on to say that one of the things he did

that he was ashamed of is he was constantly hiding things from wives and girlfriends and loved ones. Do you think it's possible that he could have been hiding a pattern of drinking from you in that time? No. I really don't. He misspoke in that letter. And I will say that he was, again, I hadn't seen him in a few weeks before he wrote that letter or published it. I don't know what his state of mind was, but he was not in a great place, obviously, when he wrote that. He didn't run it by anybody before he published it.

So I don't think he was in the best place, and I think if I had asked him to clarify, he would have. The only hard part about it for me is that we have a kid. And it's really tough to have a famous parent, especially when that famous parent is going through something really hard. And it's just, you know, it does, it definitely irks me that people are like, oh, well, Super Size Me was a lie. Like, it wasn't. He was not drinking. And that's all there is to it. I don't know what else to tell people except you got to take my word for it, take Scott's word for it.

Scott is Scott Ambrosi, the cinematographer and cameraman on Super Size Me, the only cameraman. There's only one person in the world that can tell you whether he was drinking or not. And that would be me. Because I was with him for those 30 days, if not 24 hours a day, 23 hours. Scott and Morgan had worked together for years on other projects, including I Bet You Will, the MTV show. When Morgan had the idea for Supersize Me on his mom's couch in West Virginia, Scott was the first person he called. While they were filming Supersize Me, Scott traveled with Morgan everywhere. They were in the car together, they shared hotel rooms, and Scott was always filming. And I can guarantee you that he was not drinking during those times.

Unless he was in the bathroom and he had a vial and he's swigging it down, but I didn't notice any kind of change in his behavior or his abilities and whatnot. And to be perfectly honest, I truly don't believe that he would break his own rules. The rule was he could only consume something if it came from McDonald's. And he did not his own rules. The rule was he could only consume something if it came from McDonald's.

And he did not break that rule. And I was there, and I know he didn't. Scott says that if Morgan was binge drinking alone, in the bathroom or wherever, that would have been a hard secret to keep from him. Because Scott and Morgan were close, and Scott knew what Morgan was like after a few drinks. There are moments in my life where I would hang out with Morgan, and I wish I didn't because the next day was really important.

You know, it kind of messed up a couple of important days for me. But we had fun, you know? I mean, you know, I was the guy with the video camera in the 90s and I always had a video camera with me. When Scott and Morgan were making I Bet You Will, they would get to their filming location, find the busiest club or bar in town, and pass out flyers to try to get contestants on the show. And they would often stick around and party.

I have all this footage of me and Morgan out, and a lot of it is, to be perfectly honest, drunken camera stuff. And I've got some footage of Morgan just completely trashed and just looking at the expression on his face. And you know back in the day you're thinking oh we're all just drinking we're having a good time but now looking at it with a different filter you know yeah I kind of do

recognize that he had a problem. So if that's true then what was really going on with Morgan's liver and those test results? In the film, we see one of his doctors telling Morgan that it's likely a fatty liver disease. And according to Alex, the official diagnosis was non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, which is a form of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. This is now an extremely common diagnosis, but back in 2003, it wasn't that well understood. The conventional wisdom back then was that liver damage is normally caused by alcohol abuse, which is what you hear from the doctors. I spoke with Dr. Jeffrey Schwimmer. He's the founder and director of the Fatty Liver

Clinic at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego. He's one of the top experts in the field, and I should say he was not involved in the film in any way. He explained that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is largely genetic, but that diet also plays a role. So if Morgan had the genetic predisposition, it's certainly possible that this extreme diet was a factor in him developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. But it doesn't mean that everyone who eats like this would have liver issues. Dr. Schroemer also said that those blood tests

that Morgan takes at the start of the film, they wouldn't have been able to tell if Morgan had this genetic predisposition, and they wouldn't have been able to give you a great view into Morgan's liver chemistry. So in the film, the story that Morgan lays out is that he consumed only McDonald's, and that's what caused these bad test results on his liver.

That's definitely possible, especially if he had this genetic predisposition. Dr. Schwimmer stressed that, like so many issues around health and nutrition and diet, it really depends on the person and it's complicated. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share.

Um, Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.

I would have never existed. I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2,

starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Okay, on to Chapter 5, The Legacy. When Super Size Me first came out 20 years ago, one of the many people to see it was Emily Contois. Today she's an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa. She has a master's degree in public health and has

written a lot about gender, food, and body image in media. Emily first saw Super Size Me in the theater as a student at the University of Oklahoma. At the time she knew that she was interested in health and nutrition, issues that were getting a lot more attention across America than ever before. So 2003 is the year that the Surgeon General of the United States literally likens obesity to the war on terror. He calls it the terror within. It is escalated to that extent that obesity is as big of an issue as the war on terror

following 9-11. This is the first time that it's called an epidemic. So it's being spoken about with the kinds of language we typically use for an infectious disease that's attacking us. Governments and school districts began getting in on the fight. In 2003, California banned the sale of soft drinks in grade schools. In 2006, all of the big beverage companies agreed to sell only small, low-calorie beverages in schools. And officials also turned their attention to students.

Arkansas is one of the first states to move to a BMI report card in the public schools. BMI stands for Body Mass Index, and it's a calculation based on your height and weight. It's supposed to measure your body fat, and it's been used by doctors to gauge risk factors in health. But it's been widely criticized as inaccurate, and not a great measure of a person's overall health. Still, by 2010, millions of students were receiving BMI report cards, and 29 states had policies in place that encouraged or required schools to weigh students or calculate their

BMI. So that as a child gets their grades and they're sent home to their parents to have conversations about their intellectual development, that there would also be their BMI ranking as a way to start conversations within family about weight and this presumed need to force little kids to lose weight. And I cannot state strongly enough how bad of an idea this was, but it was one that was absolutely moved forward. And at that moment where people really thought, right, like obesity is bad, we have to intervene,

but there's nothing worse we can do than introduce all these food anxieties, body anxieties, right, with children. Like, we have irrefutable evidence that that causes poor relationships with eating, difficulties with weight, you know, poor health out-kindness from yo-yo dieting or cycling through diets, that it can be much more healthy to just focus on delicious fresh foods or, you know, focusing on learning how to cook or garden or something like that, than ever focusing on weight. It's against this backdrop that Morgan is taking Super Size Me to schools across the

country doing talks and screenings. But as I discussed with Emily, that backdrop today is very different. So did you get a chance to watch Super Size Me again? Yeah, I watched it again with my husband. Oh, okay. Like we watched it together that first time like 20 years ago. Oh, you watched it together back then,

you watch it together now? Yeah. You know, what'd you think? I didn't remember that it's like the second shot in the film that you have what fat activists themselves have called the headless fatties. They were so common in news reports about obesity and they are throughout this film

in multiple different moments. These are shots of crowds of people walking around, sometimes in swimsuits, on the beach, with their stomachs showing, or shots of people's thighs and hips and bellies. In the film's intro, these scenes are playing out with the song Fat Bottom Girls as the soundtrack. And the shots are just of people's bodies,

either neck down or with their faces blurred out. They do not have heads, they do not have faces, they do not have eyes. These are people and they're just being represented as these freakish objects, right, for us to look at and to, you know, abhor their bodies. I don't think I knew what fat phobia was when we made the movie. This is Alex again. And it breaks my heart to think of any young people especially who watched the movie where there's definitely a couple scenes where a fat body is made the butt of the joke.

And we were so wrong to do it that way. And I think Morgan would agree. And I absolutely believe that you can be healthy at any size. And I wish I had known better. I wish I could take that back. Despite these concerns, the film has been shown in health class and schools for years and is still shown there to this day. Before I talked with Emily, I asked her if she could reach out to her recent students to see if they'd watch Super Size Me in school. When she polled them, many said that they had, sometimes multiple times, because their school would play the film year after year. These

students had plenty to say about it. The first bucket of their responses was that they were really persuaded by Spurlock's message about fast food consumption being really bad for our health. They found that really worrisome. And so a couple of them said, you know, it really soured their views on fast food and they didn't eat it again for years. There's a difference between parents and teachers telling you not to eat McDonald's and seeing Morgan puke on the big screen. So it did have that effect on some kids.

And in fact, in the year since the film came out, those franchises made a lot of changes, adding healthier menu options and posting calorie counts for customers. None of these companies have ever said that the film was an influence on their decision, but you can't deny the role of Super Size Me in the culture at the time. That said, Emily tells me that some of her other undergrads had different perspectives. Other students had really good health teachers in my opinion, but they had more nuanced conversations about what might be missing from the film and what its shortcomings would be. But the one that touched my heart the most was one student for whom the fat stigma that

is so on the surface throughout the film really affected her personally. This student saw the film in seventh grade health class. She had the experience of her teacher just putting the film on one day with no context or discussion afterwards. Here's what she wrote in her response. The movie did not help my self-esteem in the slightest. I was always a bigger kid and this movie made me feel even bigger. Overall, I hated this movie, and I would never show it to my students or to kids. [♪ music playing, and it was in stage three. He went through surgery and radiation treatment,

but then this past February, the cancer returned. Cancer had spread everywhere. It was in his lungs, it was in his brain. It was just, you know, so he had to come over again and tell our kid that it has bred. I'm sorry, this is so, it just happened, you know? It's just so hard. It's so wild to be talking about Supersize Me and remember him so vibrant and healthy and excited and engaged. He was always the most energetic person in the room.

And to see him over the course of a year just really wither and diminish was heartbreaking. Morgan kept his cancer diagnosis private. He didn't even tell close friends. So it was a shock to many people to hear that he died this past May. Alex told me that she really wanted people to know that Morgan loved his kids, that he was a great father, even during the hard times. She recalled a story from one Halloween in particular with their son, Lakin.

So we asked Lakin, what do you wanna be? And he's like, cockroaches, such a New York City kid, right? It's like, I wanna be cockroaches. So Morgan had one of his friends who is like a costume designer. I wish we still had them. They were amazing. Cockroach costumes with the little legs.

And they were like easy to put on. It was so rad. And we walked around the three of us and we were cockroaches together. It was so cute. I mean, we were not even together anymore. And we had the best time that night. There was one more story Alex wanted to tell me about. We were not even together anymore, and we had the best time that night.

There was one more story Alex wanted to tell me about, a story that she thinks Morgan would have loved to hear. One of my good friends, she was one of the few people I texted when I was like, hey, you're going to see the announcement tomorrow, Morgan died today. And she was like, are you ready? And I was like, I bet you $100 within the first 24 hours, some vegan reaches out to me and says, do you think it was the McDonald's that killed him? And it was like less than an hour. I was like, 24 hours. And she said, nope.

Like within minutes, people were like,, oh well, I'm sure it was that McDonald's diet all those years ago that led to his death. I'm like, please, people, come on, calm down. I know. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh, vegans. I'm an ex-vegan.

I can say these things now. Thanks to Alex Jamieson, Sean Lawton, Scott Ambrosie, Dr. Emily Contois, Hachi Chukwu, Lux Alptram, and Dr. Jeffrey Schwimmer for sharing their stories and expertise for this episode. Thank you, Senior Producer Andres O'Hara. Next week on the show, I talk with the one and only Bobby Flay. We'll discuss how he got his start in food TV, why he thinks TV chefs lose street cred, and what happened when he called up the New York Times restaurant critic after a bad review. That's next week. Meanwhile, if you want to hear more Sporkful episodes, check out last week's show with Ed Gamble,

comedian and co-host of the podcast Off Menu. That one's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to the Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXM.com slash Sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara. It was edited by Camille Stanley. Our engineer

is Jared O'Connell and our intern is Julia Leo. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios, our executive producers are Nora Richie and Colin Anderson. Until next time, I'm Dan Paschman. And I'm Corey. I'm Jenny. And we're in New York City on our honeymoon. We just got done eating an excellent dinner at Anateka Maria, and we're here to tell you to eat more.

Eat better. And eat more better. That was Sporkful's senior producer, Andres O'Hara. If you're looking for more Sporkful episodes to listen to, check out their episode, Is Your Recipe Lying to You? An investigation into all the ways recipes deceive you. Listen and follow The Sporkful wherever you get your podcasts. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.

Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.