It appears that the Super Size Me diet is not as destructive as it was portrayed on film. MSNBC (of all places) ran Super Size Me a few weeks ago and we caught it on Tivo. What nobody ever mentioned (that I heard about anyway) was that film creator and principal star Morgan Spurlock was far more than just a regular Joe out to prove something. As I recall, the first weigh in they determined he had something like 11% body fat, which puts him way into the "athletic" range. Also never mentioned was his girlfriend was a vegan, which means he was most likely eating an extremely different diet before he started the project.

Once I got my head around those two data points, the whole film turned from "an example of corporate evil run amok in America" adventure into a "well what the hell did you expect to happen, moron?" sort of experience. Any time you make a radical change in diet you're going to go through all sorts of unpleasant side-effects until your body adjusts. Especially if you're an extremely athletic person eating what would presumably be a very low fat, low calorie diet.

There does seem to be a bit of good coming out of the whole project though. According to the article, the variety of results that happened when a more scientific approach was used could lead to new ways to treat obesity.