McDonald's: Still the Absolute Worst, Now Brainwashing Children
McDonald’s, a protracted practical joke whose punchline is cardiovascular disease, is apparently still sore enough over Super Size Me that they’ve produced a documentary of their own to refute its depiction of their so-called “food.” Only this one—entitled 540 Meals—is being shown as educational material to school children around America. Dammit.
The film chronicles the efforts of an Iowa high school science teacher named John Cisna to lose weight while eating only McDonald’s food for 90 days. Cisna challenged his students to prepare daily menus for him, with the stipulation that his diet must be capped at 2,000 calories per day but must include every item on the McDonald’s menu at least once. And it worked! Sorta! Cisna claims to have lost 37 pounds by the end of his experiment. Which, hey, right on, way to slim down, my dude.
Here’s the 20-minute video, if you’re curious:
If this were just some dipshit Iowa nerd going solo to debunk Super Size Me, it would still be a stupid and unscientific undertaking—weight loss is a thing that will happen if you go from eating more than your particular caloric needs per day to less than your particular caloric needs per day and incorporate a little exercise into your routine (which Cisna did for this experiment). You don’t need to be a big fancy science teacher to figure it out, and you damn sure don’t need to subject yourself to three months of McDonald’s food, for crying out loud. But that’s not what this is—it’s now been grabbed up as another deeply cynical marketing ploy by the gasping corporate artifact that is the McDonald’s Corporation.
The Lunch Tray has the details, and they are, well, they’re about what you’d expect from as soulless and desperate an operation as the golden arches (emphasis added):
McDonald’s has since officially retained Cisna as its paid brand ambassador and he now travels around the country to promote the fast food chain to middle and high schoolers, as well as dietetic students.
The message being sent here—again, this is to kids, in schools, who are being required to sit through a McDonald’s advertisement for reasons passing understanding—is that it is perfectly healthy to eat from the McDonald’s menu, and that, in fact, an all-McDonald’s diet can actually be good for you. Never mind that different people have different caloric needs (like, say, a 280-pound middle-aged man and a 140-pound middle-school kid, for example)—the question ought to be just why in the hell the dietary suitability of McDonald’s food is deemed valuable classroom material for, like, any student, ever.
Cisna has turned this ridiculous experiment into a second career: he’s got a self-published book and now spends his days touring the country as a paid McDonald’s spokesperson, infiltrating schools with the mission of telling kids that eating repurposed goose shit dressed up in an assload of sodium is good for their health.
Listen to this asshole:
Some of the skeptics said, “Well, he only ate salads.” No. I had everything. I had Big Macs, I had the Habanero, I had Quarter Pounders with Cheese, I had ice cream cones, I had sundaes. And what’s really amazing, that people find unbelievable, is probably 95% of every day, I had French fries. I love French fries and that was a great part of it.
Cisna carefully omits the part where he had to dramatically shrink his intake on certain days to make up for the brutal caloric overload of having eaten a single Big Mac on a previous day.
Parents of America! Find out if your childrens’ school system is planning on hosting this dipshit and his corporate propaganda and, if they are, demand that someone be fired for this shit. Also, fart in your neighborhood McDonald’s. Just walk in, stand in front of the counter, and let it rip.