Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome to episode 19 of The Cancer Pod.
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This is the third installment of the at the movies pod.
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In today's episode, we're reviewing Supersize Me a documentary from 2004.
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I'm Dr.
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Tina Kaczor, and when I was little my favorite fast food was Wendy's
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And I'm Dr.
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Lee Sherman.
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And when I was a kid, my favorite fast food was Arby's.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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Horsey sauce!
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And we're two naturopathic doctors who practice integrative cancer.
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But we're not your doctors
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This is for education, entertainment and informational purposes.
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Only
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do not apply any of this information without first speaking to your doctor.
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The views and opinions expressed on this podcast by the host and their guests are solely their own.
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Welcome to The Cancer Pod.
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Hey, Tina
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Hey Leah.
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How's it going?
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Pretty well Hey Tina, this is the third movie of our series.
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I love this.
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I'm having a good time.
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This is fun.
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I mean, we're going to, we're going to revert back to our old format, but I think we're going to come back to these if people like them.
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Yes.
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We'll see what people say.
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So if you like it, let us know if you don't let us know that too.
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And so this last film in our At The Movies series is a 2004 film that was actually, I think it was a winner at Sundance.
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Yeah, it is called Supersize Me and I thought, I felt when it first came out, but tI actually think I saw it a few years later because yeah, I was in school when it came out and there's no way I watched a movie when I was in school.
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Cause I was too busy.
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That makes sense.
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So the movie is rated PG 13.
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I don't think we discussed the ratings on the previous ones, but they had like a lot of those little things in the upper left-hand corner.
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And I forgot what they're called.
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Cal language nudity, sexual content, smoking, substance use, and violence.
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Did it have all those things?
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I don't know.
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I don't know.
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Definitely had the nudity.
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Well, yeah.
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So, um, the, the description of the movie, which is available if you have prime video it's available there.
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You know, if you have the subscription.
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It's for free on Pluto, TV, I think YouTube, and Tubi.
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The description is"director Morgan Spurlock's social experiment in fastfood gastronomy sees him attempting to subsist uniquely on food from the McDonald's menu for an entire month.
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In the process, his weight balloons, his energy level plummets..." this is giving away the hold dang movie.
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"He also examines the corporate giants growing role in the lives of American consumers and explores its methods of indoctrinating young people and its contribution to America's obesity epidemic." Okay.
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I didn't read that too well, but I didn't want to tell you all the stuff we're going to talk about.
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Got it.
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That's the premise of the movie.
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Yeah.
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So he basically eats McDonald's and only McDonald's for an entire month.
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He has very specific rules.
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He just can't eat willy nilly.
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Right.
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I mean, he has very specific guidelines.
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Yeah.
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So he sets out and he says, there's four rules.
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He will only, super-size a meal when he's asked to supersize a meal and he has to eat everything on the menu at least once.
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And if it's an item in McDonald's, doesn't sell it.
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He can't eat it so he can only eat off the menu, but that does include water.
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So he could purchase this water off the menu.
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And then he has to have three square meals per day.
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Now that's as eating rules.
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He kind of alludes and quickly kind of glosses over this point.
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He also is intentionally sedentary.
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Right?
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Cause he's a new Yorker and for anyone who's lived in New York city, I mean, you walk that's your transportation.
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Right.
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What's really funny is one of the McDonald's he shows at the beginning, I live near that one in the east village back in the day, but yeah, so he intentionally takes cabs instead of his usual walking.
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Yes.
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So that that's an important factor that we're going to come back to.
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And so what I want to do is I want to explain what supersize is.
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Supersize ended about the time, like right before the movie came.
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They stopped supersizing I believe it was in March of 2004.
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Maybe.
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I don't know.
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I thought it was just after the movie.
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You think it was just before the movie,
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The movie came out in May.
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Okay.
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And I thought that I had read that the supersizing stopped in March, so a large.
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soda available at McDonald's now is a 32 ounce.
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And so to supersize it you'd go up to 42 ounces and it was just like a few cents more, I don't know, maybe, maybe a quarter at the most, it wasn't that much.
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So a 42 ounce soda is 410 calories where as it's now 290 calories for a large, and then the fries were seven ounces.
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And now there's 6.2 ounces.
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And so I guess it went from 610 calories to now the large, the largest size you can get is 490 calories.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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So roughly with the soda, it sounds like 42 ounces was 410 calories.
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So roughly 10 calories per ounce.
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Yeah.
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And I don't know.
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I think sometimes I think they have like self-serve things now, so it can vary, right?
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I mean, if, if you have, if you're pouring your own soda, like you can, at some fast food places, you can put very little ice and more drink, you know?
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So who knows, like when, if it was really 42 ounces, is it just more ice in the same amount of soda?
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Who knows?
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But anyway, so that's what supersize was because it no longer exists.
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Okay.
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Well, and McDonald's now does have all of this on their website, right?
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Their entire menu and its nutritional breakdown is on their website,
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right?
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Oh it's really, yeah.
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iT's kind of funny because in the movie they touch on that.
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It's on the website, but at the time in 2004 there weren't-
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Right.
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It wasn't as prevalent people weren't like on the internet as much.
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And so they kind of like were like,"yeah, but who's, who's got access to that, you know?
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And then they went around the restaurant and showed where all the signs were that actually talked about nutritional value, but yeah.
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Let's okay.
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So let's get started.
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We're going to start off, like we usually do.
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We're going to talk about things that we like, and then we'll talk about things that we didn't like.
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All right.
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Sound good?
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Let's do it last.
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All right.
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So let's talk about some things that we liked about the movie.
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I think, well, things that I found interesting about the movie, I guess that could be a positive thing was it talked about the lawsuits that took place.
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That was what started off the whole movie, a couple of girls in New York, they tried to Sue McDonald's saying that their, their weight gain was because of McDonald's.
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Yeah.
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So framing it with that in the very start of the whole documentary very interesting way to do it.
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And from a procedural perspective, cause he goes back to the whole childhood idea of McDonald's and children and-
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right.
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Yeah.
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So he talks, he talks about how like the marketing and the media and all of that revolving around McDonald's really appealed to kids.
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they did not win that lawsuit.
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They didn't know.
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In the end, you find out that they didn't win that lawsuit.
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And then as we talked about in the first movie, there was that cheeseburger bill, which is known as the.
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Personal responsibility in consumption act.
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And that passed, I believe in the house in 2005.
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And that basically was like you can't Sue fast food rescue.
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For any of your health problems, it's not their fault.
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You have personal responsibility.
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So the movie lawsuit that they talked about was in 2002, and then in 2004 or five, I think that bill was passed.
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Okay.
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So right after this movie came out, which is interesting.
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I mean, alongside that, and that's probably one of the reasons that now we have laws that stipulate that these restaurants must put their nutrition information where people can see it.
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Whether that's online on the wall in the restaurant, you have to be able to know.
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Or if you ask for it.
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They should be able to bring out like a, a folder or something.
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Yeah.
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I think there are actually in some, depending where you are, I think there is a mandatory posting, like you must make it publicly available.
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Yeah.
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So people can make the decision fully informed.
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Yeah.
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If people understand what that information means.
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Cause not everyone knows how to read a nutrition label, you know?
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So.
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Why am I looking at my notes and I'm not seeing the stuff that I liked?
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Oh, you know, what I thought was interesting was they showed serving sizes.
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Right.
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They did the comparison of serving size.
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And I guess at the time, um, they were, they interviewed a woman and she said that in France, the large soda was the same size as, a small in the U S so I think the small at the time was 16 ounces.
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And.
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That's the largest size available.
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So in, in France, I looked up what it is now, and the medium soda is the largest one you can get.
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And that 16 ounces and the smallest one you can get as a mini and it's eight ounces.
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And that's current in France.
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That's current in France.
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Yeah.
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So I don't know if they ever changed if they were always like that.
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So that, that was something that was interesting.
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It was just like what the different sizes are like a French fries.
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When McDonald's first started, and they had the tiny little fries and then what it grew up to be, you know, by the time the movie came out, it was a massive serving.
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Car companies changed their, the cup holders.
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Right.
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To fit the big drinks that started happening.
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So
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Yeah, I liked the entertainment value of this movie a lot.
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I mean, I definitely would say this was definitely more for entertainment than to say it was rigorous in any way, like In Defense of Food, felt like it was like, we're going to make sure we stick tried and true to the literature and the data and help people with a message at the end.
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This one.
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I don't know, a little bit more embellished.
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It was a shock you mentoree, right?
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That was the word that we learned that I think we were looking, we were struggling for that word.
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So the first film, but this is definitely a shocky mentoree.
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Like there were things in it that were to draw you in and I don't want to go into the bad stuff yet, but we'll stick with the good stuff, but that, but I mean, it was a very well done shocky mentoree, right?
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It had the music, it had the graphics, it had all of the gross out parts.
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They did, but at least they put that in a cartoon When they talked about the processing and the chicken nuggets, they used a cartoon to show us
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But not when he threw up.
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Well, the throwing up, I thought was a little odd because they put the minutes up there.
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Right.
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And they showed, this is what happens after 15 minutes, 22 minutes, whatever it was.
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And I was like, well, why did he eat so darn fast.
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Yeah.
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And look, we can get into that too.
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And on the, on the, on the second half of this.
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Okay.
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Let's take two.
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Can I say another thing I really liked?
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And I appreciate.
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I think it's a completely, especially in 2004, but still to some extent today, the whole marketing to children and adolescents and.
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You know, whether it's the playgrounds that they had, or, you know, the fact that McDonald's was a clown.
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I mean, there was, you don't create a clown as you're their spokes clown.
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And that, that is not for adults.
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That's clearly for children.
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And it took a page out of the tobacco industries, book of marketing to the young people to hit those reward centers in the brain that say, this is a good thing.
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This is a good thing.
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So that when they become adults and make their choices, They turn to the McDonald's drive through.
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So,
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and they still remember the song.
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Yeah, I
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got to say, I think I know more than one.
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I mean, which is funny, cause I actually know all of their little jingles and I didn't like hamburgers, so I didn't even eat that.
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And yeah, we ate McDonald's on special occasions.
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Like I remember.
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And what's funny is when he goes to Chinatown and cause he's eating burgers all over the country pretty much, but he goes to Chinatown and he pulls out the big Mac and he's like, this is the only big Mac I've ever had that actually looks like the picture.
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But that's what I remember them looking like when I was a kid, my sister and I like, my mom would cut it in half and then we'd have half of, you know, half a big Mac.
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Cause we were little and split a fry.
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Yeah, but, and have a milkshake of course, but it was special.
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It was like a very special occasion.
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I don't think I ever was like, oh, I want to go see Ronald McDonald because he was a clown and clowns are creepy.
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But anyways, we digress.
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Well in the movie, he mentioned that one in four Americans go to a fast food restaurant every day.
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Right.
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That seemed excessive to me.
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And I didn't look up the numbers on that, but, you know, I believe it.
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I totally believe it because it's convenient.
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You have kids, you work, you're busy.
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It's seemingly cheap.
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Like I, I do believe it.
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And if you see like the lines at lunch, when you're driving around.
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When I moved to New Mexico from New York, I had a car.
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I don't know if I'd ever personally driven through a drive-through that I can remember.
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And I was like fascinated every morning.
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I'd go to a different drive-through and get breakfast.
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Okay.
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So, I mean, it was easy.
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It was on my way to work.
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Why not get my coffee?
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you know, my breakfast burrito.
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Yeah.
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Well, back to what I thought they did well, was that, was it the ethical breach in, in marketing, specifically to children?
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I think they did a good job framing that and then bringing it to the lunch room where that's just perpetuated and kids eat cruddy food at lunch, and they're served really bad pre-packaged food.
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And then he takes us to that one place in Wisconsin that was feeding.
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Oh, the Appleton's the school in Appleton.
