How long did the late Morgan Spurlock eat McDonald’s? Weight gain, health issues, and more 

The world was stunned on May 23 when it found out that noted director-actor, and the creator of the Super Size Me documentary series Morgan Spurlock has died, after a lengthy battle with cancer.

The 2004 documentary, filmed majorly by Spurlock himself, had been created to expose the hugely detrimental effects that fast food in its current form can have on the human body. To prove this, Spurlock himself took part in a radical experiment that involved him eating from McDonald’s three times a day, for 30 days.

He reduced his daily walking to an average of 1.5 miles in the United States and, during the trial, only "super-sized" his meals at the suggestion of a McDonald's employee.

The movie famously led to McDonald’s itself taking out an ad in British newspapers, back in August 2004, which included the following warning—

“If you eat too much and do too little, it’s bad for you.”

While his untimely death, at the age of 53, has led to people blaming the global fast-food chain, there is no evidence to suggest that this is true. Spurlock even followed the average American’s routine during this experiment and took around 5000 steps a day to see if the food would have any adverse effects on his health.

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Did the McDonald’s food have any effects on Morgan Spurlock’s health?

Well, while there might be no evidence of the fact that Spurlock’s cancer was in any way related to the horrendous 30-day routine, there are several ways in which his body reacted during the experiment. By the second day, the actor/director was regularly vomiting from his car seat, and was having a range of troubles with his digestive system.

By day 4, Spurlock had started to experience tremendous pain in his abdomen, as well as what he described as ‘genital discomfort.’ Furthermore, by day 9, Spurlock revealed that he was suffering from severe depression, and could not control the ‘addiction’ that he felt for McDonald’s food.

This was also accompanied by a spike in the quantity of food that he ate during his meals, as subsequent medical checks proved there was a range of other things wrong with him as well. His body weight had increased by over 11kg within a month, and the doctors had warned that his liver was under tremendous stress due to the food that he had eaten.

Furthermore, the director revealed that he was facing a range of mood swings, while his cholesterol had skyrocketed. Furthermore, he was also suffering from what he described as a ‘sexual dysfunction.”

While Spurlock’s experiment only lasted 30 days, he revealed a range of other long-term effects. He claimed that his body had become more prone to weight gains in the years that followed, and revealed that he could still feel reduced energy levels, even months after the experiment.

Hence, while McDonald’s fast food in itself cannot be said to be directly responsible for cancer, there are several profound ways in which his health deteriorated in merely 30 days.