Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Don't Eat This Book

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Don't Eat This Book

From the book:

• 37% of American children and adolescents are carrying too much fat.
• 60% of all Americans are either overweight or obese.
• One in every three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes in their lifetime. Diabetes will cut 17-27 years off your life.
• Each day, 1 in 4 Americans visits a fast food restaurant.
• In 1972, we spent 3 billion a year on fast food - today we spend more than 110 billion.
• You would have to walk for seven hours straight to burn off a Super Sized Coke, fry and Big Mac.
• In the U.S., we eat more than 1,000,000 animals an hour.
• Left unabated, obesity will surpass smoking as the leading cause of preventable death in America.
• McDonald's distributes more toys per year than Toys-R-Us.
• McDonald's operates more than 30,000 restaurants in more then 100 countries on 6 continents and represents 43% of total U.S. fast food market.
• Leave a McDonald's burger on a shelf and a year or more later it will look almost exactly as it did when you bought it - how 'natural' can a food be that doesn't rot?

About Morgan Spurlock
Spurlocks first significant foray into TV was the TV series, "I Bet You Will" in which members of the public were paid money to do disgusting/embarrassing stunts on camera - it started as a webcast and moved to TV in 2002.  His most recent production was "30 Days", in which a person spends 30 days immersing him/herself in a markedly different way of life to their own (it ran for one 6-part series in 2005, and it's not clear if there will be future series).  I believe his latest project is a series called "Public Nuisance with Morgan Spurlock", in conjunction with Comedy Central.  He lives with his fiancée, Alexandra Jamieson, whose dietary guidance helped him lose the 30 lbs he'd gained eating McDonalds in just 2 months - and led her to publish The Great American Detox Diet : 8 Weeks to Weight Loss and Well-Being (2005).

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Don't Eat This Book. It originally ran in June 2005 and has been updated for the May 2006 paperback edition. Go to magazine.