NF 5
Summer 2014
Candice Tinsley
Super Size Me Film
This is the first time that I have seen the film Super Size Me. Fast food is not a regular part of my diet, and I do not go weekly to fast food restaurants. Usually I do not eat fast food weekly although I do enjoy dessert in the evening. The only time I go out to eat is on special occasions, which is only about once or twice a month. The places that I go out to eat are Denny’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and In and Out.
This film is related to the Nutrition and Food 5 and 15 courses by some important facts and concepts. First, in class we learned about serving sizes as a part of healthy eating. In the film a nutrition professor states that the appropriate serving size of cooked meat is three ounces or the size of a deck of cards, which is the same as we learned in class. During the film there are several visual aspects used. For example, when they are explaining the sizing system of the foods, such as the differences between the original size fries and drinks and the escalation to supersize. These help emphasize the serving size issue to the viewers so they can clearly see the difference in portion sizes and thus the excess of the fats, sugars and so on that would be found within the food. The issue of serving sizes illustrated in the film was apparent to me since I have learned the appropriate serving size in our nutrition course. Second, in the film the definition of a calorie is “a measure of energy content in food. One calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise a liter of water by 1 degree Celsius.” This is the same definition that we learned in class. We also learned about the dietary guidelines for Americans and how to balance the calories to maintain weight. The guidelines say that our saturated fat consumption should be less than 10 percent of our total daily calories. In the film, the nutritionist and dietitian recommends that Morgan Spurlock eat 2500 calories per day, and of those