Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America

by Morgan Spurlock

Overview

Don’t eat this groundbreaking, hilarious book—but if you care about your country’s health, your children’s, and your own, you better read it.

For thirty days, Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s as part of an investigation into the effects of fast food on American health. The resulting documentary earned him an Academy Award nomination and broke box-office records worldwide.

But there’s more to the story, and in Don’t Eat This Book, Spurlock examines everything from school lunch programs and the marketing of fast food to the decline of physical education. He looks at why fast food is so tasty, cheap, and ultimately seductive—and interviews experts from surgeons general and kids to marketing gurus and lawmakers, who share their research and opinions on what we can do to offset a health crisis of supersized proportions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425210239
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/02/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 - 17 Years

About the Author

Morgan Spurlock was a writer, director, and producer, and in 2004 he was awarded the Best Director prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Read an Excerpt

One Do You Want Lies with That?

Don't do it. Please. I know this book looks delicious, with its lightweight pages sliced thin as prosciutto and swiss, stacked in a way that would make Dagwood salivate. The scent of freshly baked words wafting up with every turn of the page. Mmmm, page. But don't do it. Not yet. Don't eat this book.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Don't Eat This Book"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Morgan Spurlock.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Breezy, humorous.” —The New York Times

“Fact-packed and funny.” —Publishers Weekly

“Spurlock expands on [Super Size Me’s] harrowing themes of American obesity and offers causes and cures, all while remaining—get this—entertaining. Like a funnier Michael Moore.” —Maxim

“A sobering look at the country’s obesity crisis.” —People (Great Reads)

“Just reading this book will give the average reader indigestion…a shocking indictment of the fast food industry.” —Tucson Citizen

“He has a story to tell, and it’s scary enough to keep you out of that drive-through line.” —Charleston Post and Courier

“Alternately hilarious and discouraging…provides further details about the health impact of the nation’s poor eating choices.” —Toledo Blade

“Detailed and nuanced…very amusing.” —Maclean’s

“With a combination of wit, sarcasm, anger, and hard-hitting research, Spurlock argues that groups such as the American Medical Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have been corrupted by corporate interests.” —St. Paul Pioneer Press

“Spurlock [writes] in his trademark take-no-prisoners style and with a humor that saves him from sounding pious or self-satisfied. A powerful work of reporting and punditry.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

By now, the entire Western world knows the story of Morgan Spurlock's McExperiment: To test the health effects of fast food consumption, the young filmmaker indulged himself with an all-McDonald's diet for 30 days. By the end of the month, the results were painfully apparent: Spurlock had gained 25 pounds; his blood pressure had skyrocketed; and his libido had all but evaporated. His documentary Super Size Me captured his ballooning condition in award-winning fashion. Don't Eat This Book takes his fast food addiction out on the road. Spurlock travels across the country, visiting schools, hospitals, and private homes to investigate how our sleazy eating habits and the declining emphasis on health and physical education are undermining our well-being. He interviews surgeon-generals, lawmakers, health researchers, and physicians on our girth-expanding diets and even queries pint-sized kids on their eating preferences. A muckraking main course.

Though he wasn't much of an activist before his monthlong, McDonald's-eating experiment (documented in his film Super Size Me), Spurlock has since become a crusader for healthy eating. His passion is obvious in his reading of this audiobook, which delves more deeply into the issues his film raised, focusing in particular on food industry lobbyists and youth-oriented advertising. His undisguised indignation at their manipulative tactics and his contempt for the often slothful modern American lifestyle rise inexorably as he reels off statistics about calorie content, chemical additives, lack of exercise and so on. Frequently, his enthusiasm leads him to read too quickly and, without visuals showing portion sizes or unhealthy trends, the audio loses some of its impact. Spurlock also announces "sidebar" every time he begins reading what in the book are separate boxes, which is unnecessary and somewhat irritating since the information always relates to what he has been discussing. But the sincerity of Spurlock's quest and his mockery of the people behind what he sees as a national threat-he humorously mimics the voices of advertising executives and food industry honchos when reading their claims-makes this audio easy to consume. Simultaneous release with the Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 28). (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In his Academy Award-nominated documentary, Super Size Me, Spurlock gave us a firsthand look at the effects of a McDonald's diet, using himself as a guinea pig. Here, he describes that experience and takes to task McDonald's in particular and the fast food industry in general for their shameless advertising, lobbying, and public relations tactics; he also exposes organizations supporting the fast food industry that claim to know what constitutes a healthy diet. In his view, the expansion of McDonald's into Asia, Europe, and Africa is causing the breakdown of traditional diets and the rise of obesity and related illnesses in countries where it was formerly minimal or nonexistent. In discussing the widespread use of fast food in schools, he points to the differences in student health and performance when the schools replace these foods with healthy fare. Sidebars throughout complement the text with facts and figures placing the fast food dilemma in a broader perspective. Readers interested in a comprehensive look at the fast food industry's influence on our eating habits and fans of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Marion Nestle's Food Politics will eagerly digest this book. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/04.]-Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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