Child Obesity In Super Size Me: Film Analysis

Childhood obesity is a serious public health concern. An estimated 28% of children and adolescents in Australia are overweight or obese. In the film, Supersize Me which is a 2004 part documentary film, part health experiment directed by Morgan Spurlock. In the film, he records the effects of a 30 day experiment in which he only ate McDonald’s food to see the effects that has on his physical and mental health. On the other hand, the article “Childhood obesity: smart leadership required” published on the 2nd of September 2018 on the MJA explores the concept of child obesity as a major public health concern.

Supersize Me is a documentary film by Morgan Spurlock which emphasises the dangers of fast food and their effects on human health. In the movie, Spurlock has used several film techniques to get the audience’s attention. ^ He presents his facts and ideas in a way that the audience will not get bored. Moreover, he represents the statistics shown by using colourful, bold and large fonts so that the viewer is able to notice the information easily. The documentary is not only informative, but also entertaining as he represents his facts a way where the viewer would be interested in watching. He also uses a sarcastic tone in some of the facts he shows. For example he sarcastically stated “America has the fattest people in the world. Congratulations!” ^ As he says that, he also shows Americans sitting and eating unhealthy food. This is another technique that Spurlock uses as he focuses on certain things to reveal certain messages. Instead of showing images of people eating, he could have shown pictures of them walking or exercising but he has put the pictures there to show that they are lazy and obese from the unhealthy food they get from fast food restaurants. He also includes songs that make fun of fast food companies to make the documentary more interesting.

While, in the article, “Childhood obesity: smart leadership required”, a similar concept is explored. The article suggests that at 5 years of age, one in five Australian children are already affected by overweight or obesity and that childhood obesity is an increasing health threat. The article then comes to explain how our actions may cause the population to become more obese and how we can prevent that. ^ Professor Louise Baur, from the University of Sydney with his colleagues wrote: “Systems-based policy actions may change long term obesity prevalence in children by targeting the food environment through nutrition labelling, healthy foods in schools and restricting unhealthy food marketing to children to reduce consumption of harmful foods and sugar-sweetened beverages.” They have concluded that fixing the problem of obesity is achievable and can be done through many ways such as community initiatives, support from individuals and smart governance across countries.

To conclude, child obesity is a major problem affecting many children, particularly in the US, which can lead to detrimental effects on the health of children in the future. This is shown by the statistics in the article as well as in the film Super Size Me. These health problems would be hard to fix if obese people kept on increasing at the rate it is now. It would benefit the society if these problems were to be fixed as soon as possible.