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McDonald's pushes weight-loss documentary to schools

McDonald’s is promoting a movie that advises high-school students that if they eat at McDonald’s they will be following a healthy, "balanced" diet.

October 15, 2015

McDonald’s is promoting a movie that advises high-school students that if they eat at McDonald’s they will be following a healthy, "balanced" diet, Fortune reports.

It is offering to school officials a documentary produced by Iowa high school science teacher John Cisna, who claims he ate only at McDonald’s and exercised for six months, and lost nearly 60 pounds, the article stated.

Cisna made the 20-minute documentary, "540 Meals: Choices Make the Difference," in 2014, as a retort to Morgan Spurlock’s "Super Size Me," a 2004 movie that was widely viewed as an indictment not only of McDonald’s, but of fast food in general and of the entire industrial food system, the article stated. Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days, and reported suffering physical and psychological ills, including weight gain, elevated cholesterol and mood swings.

Spurlock began his experiment in good physical shape. He purposefully overate, always answering "yes," when asked at McDonald’s restaurants if he wanted to "super size" his meals, the article stated. Cisna, who started out overweight, limited himself to 2,000 calories a day, but he ate every item on the McDonald’s menu at least once.

After getting attention for his film, Cisna was approached by McDonald’s, for whom he is now a paid "brand ambassador," making appearances at schools and maintaining a Twitter account where he promotes his school appearances, the article stated.

This week, freelance writer Bettina Elias Siegel reported on her blog, The Lunch Tray, that McDonald’s has produced a "teacher’s discussion guide," which suggests documentary be shown in classes "as a supplemental video to current food and nutritional curriculum." A McDonald’s franchisee in the New York Tri-State region issued a press release in August recommending "540 Meals" to "high school educators looking for information to demonstrate the importance of balanced food choices," the article stated.

Siegel, who advocates for healthful school meals, was scathing in her assessment of the documentary. The documentary amounts to a "veritable infomercial for the beleaguered fast food chain," she wrote.

McDonald’ is standing by its use of documentary, while also stressing it didn’t create the movie, the article stated.