Super Size Me

We've all heard of suffering for your art but driving yourself to the brink of liver failure, borderline impotency and to such a state of bad health your doctors warn you could die seems as extreme as it can get.

Yet it's exactly that course of action which has just won first-time feature film-maker Morgan Spurlock a whole mantlepiece of awards, including the prestigious best director gong at the Sundance Film Festival.

Inspired by a news item about two girls suing McDonald's for causing their obesity, he embarked on a month-long experiment.

The rules were that he had to eat only items from across the McDonald's counter (no special orders) for 30 days, indulge in three square meals per day (breakfast, lunch and dinner), munch through every item on the menu at least once and "super size" his meal whenever the option was offered to him.

The idea was to record the state of his health prior to his new diet and immediately after it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results were rather frightening.

As his intake of fried and sodium-rich foods increased so too did his cholesterol, sodium levels and harrowing doctor visits.

He transformed from a healthy, cheery fella with a good sex life to an overweight, morose figure no longer capable of satisfying his worried vegan chef (of all things) girlfriend. In fact, the effects of a mere month of fast-food living were so extreme, it took more than a year for his body to recover.

Despite the disturbing and, at times, depressing subject matter, this film is delivered with enough punch and wit to keep the pace and Spurlock proves to be an engaging screen character.

The documentation of his fast food frenzy is well balanced with candid and eye-opening interviews with expert folk through 20 US cities. These include surgeons, gym teachers, cooks, lawmakers, advertising execs and some rotund examples of American youth, who all share their research, opinions and gut feelings on the country's ever-expanding girth.

What might surprise some most about this rather hard-hitting film is that Spurlock got away with it. Already a box office smash in the States and listed as the fourth highest-grossing documentary ever, there has, as yet, been no law suit filed from the McDonald's camp.

This has been claimed as being a strategy for avoiding yet more publicity for the film, yet it still seems quite an achievement considering Ronald's reputation for thrashing critics in expensive court battles.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, six weeks after the blazing publicity of Super Size Me at Sundance, McDonald's announced it was phasing out its Go Large option.

The company, of course, insisted this plan was always intended to be executed but such coincidental timing begs the question of whether this film has been more influential than anyone could have imagined.