Would You Like Perspective With That?

The Heritage Foundation and the "Center for Individual Freedom" have found a new cause for alarm! ("I am writing today to ask for your help on an issue of utmost importance) Subway is using the following tray liner in its restaurants in Europe:

Why are Americans so fat?

In the Michael Moore tradition, New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock does some deep questioning and self experiments for 30 days on products from the world’s largest fast food company.

Astounding revelations…scary liver levels and horrifying blood levels that would cause any doctor the highest degree of alarm.

In this top satire, which won the prize for best direction from Sundance 2004, Spurlock explores the questions of responsibility between big business and consumers, and the big money which contributes to this “Fast Food” culture, and how to make Americans healthy again. An ironic hit into the stomach that is enriched by fat and facts behind this dubious mega industry.

Passage near Statue of Liberty:

You care about what you eat and everything isn’t equal? Then you shouldn’t miss this film about foolish intake. It will open your eyes.

So Subway recommends a film about gluttony focusing on McDonalds, as a satire (not a documentary) about "foolish intake", and that's the equivalent of a five alarm fire - and "a shameless and anti-American effort to increase sales in Europe"? Okay....

The bulletin from the Heritage Foundation links to information about how Soso Whaley, an Adjunct Fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute who, when starting her own "McDonalds only diet", claimed,

My real purpose is not to prove something, rather, I see this as a unique opportunity to explore food and weight issues and separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to what is reported about our health and well being in the media and other sources.

She then demonstrated that by following a strictly calorie controlled diet she could eat at McDonalds every day for a month and still lose weight. Well, duh. (In a most peculiar coincidence, even though she was not out to prove anything, her organization issued a press release describing her project in advance of the start of her "diet".)

Given that most Americans, and by now probably most people in the world, have eaten at a McDonalds, for the most part without any health consequences or noticeable weight gain, perhaps the Heritage Foundation simply believes us (or, more correctly, its townhall.com subscribers) to be stupid. We're going to forget our own experience, and assume that anybody who reads a tray liner about a "satire" will believe that anybody who eats at McDonalds will become as fat and unhealthy as the producer of Super Size Me. (Surely they don't expect us to believe that Ms. Whaley's experience is typical, do they?)

So it's another "Chicken Little" act from the Heritage Foundation.