Joe D’Amico probably had the best of intentions when he set out to eat an all-McDonald’s diet for thirty days leading up to the L.A. Marathon. And, in fact, as a result of internet buzz, his “food challenge” ended up raising $26,000 for Ronald McDonald charities.
At the race a few days ago, D’Amico set a personal record and improved his cholesterol levels in the process!
So a clear win-win-win!
But isn’t there some Grinch out there to point out the dark side of all of this?
Not at the Huffington Post, which has been nothing but complementary (see here and here), . . . leaving it to the Situationist to rain on everyone’s parade.
Why am I skeptical about this stunt?
Well, for starters it fits in quite neatly with previous strategies by big tobacco and big food to employ salient counterexamples to show that cigarettes don’t cause cancer and eating copious amounts of fast food has no ill effects on a person’s health.
As Situationist contributors Jon Hanson, David Yosifon, and I chronicled in the 2004 article, “Broken Scales: Obesity and Justice in America,” Don Gorske, the six foot tall, 170-pound world record holder for eating Big Macs (over 20,000 as of July 2004), has been repeatedly cited as proof that plentiful fast food doesn’t cause weight gain. The problem, in part, is that “we use positive-test theories to analyze the evidence we confront. If we want proof that fast food does not make people fat, and that it is, in fact, a matter of genes or watching too many Friends reruns, all we have to do is go into any McDonald’s and our eyes and minds will fix on the one or two skinny people wolfing down Big Macs.”
D’Amico may not know it, but he’s just a tool in McDonald’s box of strategies aimed at fighting the science on obesity that links the high calorie, sweet and salty foods that the fast food company sells with serious health problems.
In interviews, D’Amico hems so closely to the company line that it’s hard to believe he’s not an official spokesman: “If you make good choices and better choices more often than not, you’re going to have good results . . . . There’s diet, there’s exercise, there’s stress. There’s a lot of things. That’s something I try to tell people to keep in mind. Don’t focus on one aspect look at things as a whole.”
Ronald himself couldn’t have said it better: go ahead order that Angus Bacon and Cheese, large fries, and Chocolate Triple Thick Shake. What’s a 2400 calorie lunch (with 91 grams of fat) going to do? Probably lower your cholesterol!
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Related Situationist Posts:
- News about the Captured Situation of Food Policy
- Winning the Food Fight
- “Dr. David Kessler Waxes Situationist,”
- “The Situation of Eating – Part II,”
- “The Situation of Eating,”
- “Our Situation Is What We Eat,”
- “Social Networks,”
- “The Situation of Fatness = Our ‘Obesogenic’ Society,”
- “Innovative Policy: Zoning for Health,”
- “McDonalds tastes better than McDonalds, if it’s packaged right,” and
- “The Situation of Repackaging.”
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