The McDonald's Diet

    This morning I came across this headline at the Daily Mail: "I'm eating nothing but McDonald's to lose weight... with VERY surprising results." The gist of the article is that in February, Kevin Maginnis, from Tennessee, started on a challenge to eat nothing but McDonald's food for 100 days. At the time he started, he weighed 238 pounds. 44 days in, he has lost 34 pounds and lowered his cholesterol. It isn't a hog fest:

Per the rules he set for himself, he is only allowed to eat half of what he orders, but he has free reign to get whatever he wants, including dessert. He also adheres to eating just three meals a day without snacks and drinking water instead of soda. 

He adds:

'I'm never depriving myself. I’m eating McFlurries, I’m eating cinnamon rolls, I’m hitting Big Macs, I’m eating French fries,' he told Today. 'I’m just delaying myself because I’m going eat the whole thing. I’m just not going to eat it all in one sitting.'

His results were not really all that surprising to me, though. 

    In 2004, documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock released his film, Supersize Me. The film supposedly documented his going on a fast-food diet for 30-days where he ate and drank nothing but for what he bought from McDonald's. Equally important to where he ate was how he ate: supposedly, anytime he was asked if he wanted to "supersize" his order (i.e., an extra large servings portion no longer available) he would agree. He also claimed that the McDonald's food was addictive. He went on to gain 24 ½ pounds and reported other health problems. Unfortunately for Spurlock, no one has been able to replicate his experience. In fact, based on what he has said about his diet, it appears that it would have been impossible for him to have actually had a caloric intake as high as he claims (5,000 calories/day). But while he made general claims, he refuses to release his actual data on what he ate. 

    Spurlock's experiment is questionable and his conclusions appear to have been debunked, but the Supersize Me film had such broad support amongst the media and popular culture at the time (it was widely shown in schools, for instance) that people still believe Spurlock and his conclusions. 

     One of the best sources for refuting Spurlock was the 2009 documentary Fat Head from comedian Tom Naughton. (See the video below). Naughton followed Spurlock's diet as set out in Supersize Me--against his doctor's advice, by the way--and his results were quite different (and even shocked his doctor): he lost 12 pounds and his total cholesterol went down (although his HDL remained the same). He then conducted a different experiment, which Wikipedia summarizes:

At the end of his experiment, Naughton details an additional experiment inspired by his research into the lipid hypothesis. In this second experiment, he cuts out most sugars and starches from his diet for a month, eating foods such as cheeseburgers without buns, eggs and bacon fried in butter, steaks, Polish sausage, fruit in heavy cream, and green vegetables in butter. He uses coconut oil to fry onions for his cheeseburgers and eats fried shredded cheese as a snack. As a result, Naughton says that his energy level and mood have suffered no deleterious effects, despite him often working until 2 AM on a large programming project with a tight deadline. At the end of the month, his overall cholesterol has dropped from 222 to 209, with his LDL having dropped from 156 to 130 and his HDL having increased from 49 to 64.

Unlike Spurlock, Naughton was not addicted to McDonald's food--in fact, he was quite turned off by the stuff by the end of his experiment. 

VIDEO: "Fathead (1080p) FULL MOVIE - Documentary"

Gravitas HEALTH | Free Movies (1 hr 46 min.)

    Others have tried McDonald's diets as well with similar results:

• "Woman says 'McDonald's diet' took off weight"--NBC News (2005). It reports: "Inspired by the documentary “Super Size Me,” Merab Morgan decided to give a fast-food-only diet a try. The construction worker and mother of two ate only at McDonald’s for 90 days — and dropped 37 pounds in the process." She restricted herself to a 2,000/day diet.
• "Man Who Lost 60 Pounds from Eating McDonald's Every Day for Six Months Debuts Documentary"--Delish (2018). This involved one John Cisna, a science instructor at Colo Nesco High School. He did his experiment in 2014, but released a documentary in 2018.

He ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 180 straight days—all at McDonald's. But Cisna carefully chose his meals, counting calories (limiting his daily intake to 2,000 calories) and incorporating moderate exercise four to five days each week.

• "Man claims he lost weight eating nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days"--Metro (2018). Ryan Williams limited himself to a 2,500 calories/day for the first week and 2,300 after that, plus a 1-hour workout each morning. He lost 16 pounds.
• "This University Professor Ate at McDonald's for an Entire Month and She Didn't End Up Supersized"--INC. (2018). Drexel University professor Nyree Dardarian "set a target of 1,400 calories worth of McDonald's food each day, with 200 non-McDonald's calories each day that she could use however she liked. She also kept a daily log of her food and activity for the month of June 2018." Her non-McDonald's intake was reserved for wine or beer. 

At the end of her 30-day McDonald's diet, Dardarian's results were completely different than those experienced by Morgan Spurlock. She gained just one pound, her blood chemistry remained within normal values, and she didn't experience the mood swings and other mental and physical problems Spurlock did. She did experience some intense cravings for regular, non-McDonald's food choices, however.

The takeaway is that Supersize Me seems to have fallen victim to the reproducibility crises, not helped by his refusal to release his diary of what he ate and how much. The other main takeaway is that its not the fast food as much as it is caloric intake. Those that kept calories to 2,000 or so combined with moderate exercise experienced health benefits.