[Foodplanning] News: Assessing the Health Impacts of "Fast Foods"

[Ashwani Vasishth]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,1866485,00.html

Only another 5,500 calories to go ...

A Swedish university has replicated Morgan 
Spurlock's Super Size Me junk food binge under 
lab conditions. The early results are surprising, 
says Marten Blomkvist

Thursday September 7, 2006
The Guardian

Illustration Omitted:
  	French fries / junk food / fast food / McDonalds / chips
Photograph: Joe Raedle / Getty Images

There are two polarised reactions to Morgan 
Spurlock's 2004 documentary Super Size Me, in 
which the American film-maker ate nothing but 
McDonald's food for a month. Lots of people are 
disgusted to see what happens to the 
33-year-old's body as he accepts Super Size shake 
after Super Size shake and limits himself to 
5,000 steps a day and are shocked as his liver 
becomes toxic, his cholesterol skyrockets and his 
libido sags. Everyone else thinks: hey, how bad 
can it be? I wouldn't mind doing that.

Well, at one Swedish university, a group of 
students are getting the chance. At the 
University of Linköping, the Spurlock experience 
is being replicated under clinical conditions. In 
February, seven healthy medical students in their 
early 20s spent weeks stuffing themselves with 
hamburgers, pizzas, milk shakes and 200g bacon 
breakfasts - all on the university's tab. A 
second group of subjects are just now hitting the 
junk food. Physical exercise is to be avoided. 
Bikes are out. To discourage walking even the 
shortest distance, free bus passes have been 
issued.

The study is the brainchild of Fredrik Nyström, 
doctor and associate professor at the 
university's department of internal medicine. 
Finding himself with a little extra money in his 
research budget last year, he decided to do 
something "fun, something lasting". And ever 
since watching Super Size Me he had been thinking 
of how, in all the studies of obesity and 
metabolism, hardly anyone has studied what 
happens when you force healthy people to put on 
weight. The few studies there have been took 
place in the 60s and 70s.

The reason, speculates Nyström, is because it is 
difficult to ask people to get fat in the name of 
science. "It's far easier to study those who are 
fat to begin with," he says. "They're 
appreciative and keen, happy that someone will 
help them slim. And in the US, I assume this kind 
of study would be out of the question. Everyone 
would get sued if the subjects afterwards didn't 
manage to get rid of their extra kilos." But in 
laidback Sweden, there were no problems clearing 
the experiment with the national ethical board. 
The one proviso Nyström added was that he would 
pull anyone out of the experiment if they 
increased their bodyweight by more than 15% - 
even if he or she was prepared to go on.

It wasn't difficult for Nyström to find willing 
guinea pigs. Late last year, after delivering a 
lecture on the ills of overeating, he casually 
asked if any of the students would be prepared to 
gorge themselves for the sake of science. He was 
deluged with applications, but mostly from men 
(he thinks that women are too wary of gaining 
weight). They all had to be in good health, but 
as he says: "Young med students usually are." 
Nyström then simply chose the ones who seemed 
"the most highly motivated". At the end of the 
month, each student was they were given their 
results to keep.

Before the study began, the subjects thought they 
were in for an easy time. In fact, they could 
hardly believe their luck: "You mean to tell me 
that if I were to go out tonight, and order beer 
and peanuts, you'd pay?" said one incredulous 
student. But eating 6,000 calories a day - 
roughly double what most of the volunteers 
ingested normally - is not as easy as it sounds. 
You can't do it simply by letting yourself go and 
having an extra scoop of ice cream. It takes 
effort. One Big Mac with large fries and a large 
Coke still nets you just 1,164 calories, 
according to McDonald's Swedish website.

Just as in Super Size Me, the idea was that all 
calories would come from fast food. But breakfast 
at home was allowed, provided it was 
bacon-and-eggs based. And the fast food didn't 
have to come exclusively from McDonald's: 
hamburgers could be exchanged for pizzas, as long 
as most of the calories still came from saturated 
fats, those having the most effect on levels of 
cholesterol. Still, it wasn't unusual for 
students to be about to go to bed only to 
discover that they were some 600 calories short 
of their daily target, and forced to face a large 
calorific milk shake rather than a mug of hot 
milk.

It turns out that hunger might be an underrated 
feeling. Towards the end of the study, most of 
the students stated that they were looking 
forward to being ravenous again. Going for a 
month feeling continually sated felt odd. And 
though few of them were fitness freaks, most 
hated not being allowed to walk or cycle around. 
Nyström was surprised to find "there was more 
whining about that than about the eating".

The students managed to gain between 5-15% extra 
weight over the month. They felt "tired and 
bloated", especially during the first week, but 
there seemed to be no signs of the mood swings 
towards the end that the rather despondent 
Spurlock reported.

Final results from the questionnaires will be 
released at the end of the study. But judging 
from the provisional results, no one suffered 
anything like as much as Spurlock. One of the 
most shocking scenes in the film is when his 
three doctors urge him to abandon his experiment 
after getting the results of blood tests which 
show that his liver is so badly damaged it looks 
as though it is the result of heavy drinking - 
"You're pickling your liver!". While Nyström and 
his team also noted "significant" changes in the 
liver, relating to the liver enzyme levels in the 
blood, and the content of fat in the liver, the 
changes were "never even close to dangerous".

Nyström is puzzled about why Spurlock had such an 
extreme reaction, musing that he could perhaps 
have had an undiagnosed problem with his liver 
or, he says, "Maybe his hardcore vegetarian 
girlfriend held him to a low-energy diet, making 
him incapable of coping with this kind of food."

Interestingly, in the Swedish experiment, while 
the liver readings got steadily worse until the 
third week, they then took a turn for the better. 
The liver, it would seem, adapts. Cholesterol, 
meanwhile, was hardly affected.

And this is the most fascinating thing: if 
Nyström's small group are representative, then it 
would seem that our bodies are more adaptable 
than we give them credit for. In other words, 
metabolism may play a much more important role in 
the problem of obesity than many people think. 
Indeed, Nyström claims that for some people, 
eating 10% more will lead to their metabolism 
increasing at the same level. The extra energy 
will be burned off as body heat during sleep. "If 
that was not the case we would all have to keep 
track of every last calorie," he says. "And you 
have to realise that some overeaters consume such 
grotesque amounts that they would be even heavier 
- much heavier! - were it not for this safety 
mechanism."

That's why these kind of studies have to be 
carried out, he says: "If you only look at the 
already overweight, you'll only do research on 
those with least resistance to calories, so to 
speak."

The first part of the study finished in June; the 
next batch of subjects are now stuffing 
themselves with Big Macs. Nyström expects to 
publish final results after Christmas: not a bad 
time of year to publish a report blaming 
individual metabolism for weight gain.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

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