super size me
on saturday i ventured down to the new houserama cinema on rca and saw super size me (no, not yu-gi-oh).
the idea behind the documentary was to take a close look at fast food and how it's linked to obesity in america. the most interesting and well-known part of this was the filmmaker putting himself on a 30-day mcdonalds-only diet, eating three meals a day of mcdonalds food- much to the horror of the his vegan girlfriend.
the end result was a gain of around 25lbs, with cholesterol and miscellaneous bad stuff going through the roof. the three doctors who conducted physicals had predicted weight gain (as might anyone) but all had underestimated the other changes that took place.
right now america is obsessed with low-carb atkins diets- type atkins into google and you'll get over 4 million hits. rewind about 10 or 15 years and low-fat was the thing. really i've got to believe it comes down to just calorie intake vs energy use- the more excess energy from food the body has at the end of the day the more will be stored as fat.
anyway, the movie was quite fun and i recommend it if you've ever spent time in america. was impressed by houserama and love the idea of a wider selection of movies for thailand, but there weren't too many people in the theater. hope houserama can get some publicity among the local farang community to keep it going.
posted by jeremy @ 9:28 AM
2 Comments:
The amazing part to me was just how badly he damaged his liver. I would never have suspected that junk American food (that is unfortunately really popular here in Singapore) had all the hidden effects - every knows it makes you fat, raises your cholesteral, and gives you heart problems, but the liver and other miscellaneous stuff (mood swings, etc) were eye openers.
Regarding foreign movies in Asia - Singapore is apparently quite cosmo is this regard. I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 at least a month after release in a 100% full theatre, Supersize Me played here since before I moved over, some Japanese movie about a puppy (Quills) is incredibly popular, as are Japanese horror movies, and there are entire theatres of just M18 and R21 movies playing (with fun names like Kill Me Tender, Naked Paradise, and Billingual Lover.) I always heard that movies were censored out here, but that seems not to be the case - in fact, they seem to have a much better rating system than the USA and so can actually have more mature movies playing rather than having them cut down to be able to be R or PG13 instead of NC17 (the kiss of death rating.)
i wonder if the mood swings aren't purely psychological, as he knew he was eating unhealthy food and stuck on the diet.
yeah the liver enzyme thing was a bit crazy- wonder why his liver had to work so hard to process all of the food.
interesting to hear about the cinema in singapore. do they edit the movies or just up the ratings? here in thailand it's illegal to show someone smoking a cigarette (which means every other scene in sopranos is pixelated) and sex scenes are invariably cut from movies.
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