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It’s tempting to simply ignore morning shows, which so often peddle feel-good stories while paying no mind to the world's pressing problems. But sometimes a segment comes along that so perfectly encapsulates the perversity of modern American life that it basically demands analysis. This morning, the Today Show produced one of those segments, interviewing a middle-aged high school teacher named John Cisna who lost 37 pounds and lowered his cholesterol by eating 2,000 calories’ worth of McDonald’s food every day for 90 days.

Cisna enlisted his students as nutritionists, turning his weight-loss plan into a school project by having a few of his kids plan his daily menus. He also began walking 45 minutes each day, a change from his usual sedentary lifestyle. He got all his food free from his local McDonald’s, whose manager surely predicted that the good publicity would make up for the tiny amount of lost inventory.




I suspect that the response from the medical establishment will be that Cisna is setting a bad example for people who want to lose weight, since most of McDonald’s menu isn’t nutritionally ideal, and since eating every meal at McDonald’s is not a sustainable (or affordable) regime for most people. But I’m more concerned about the example Cisna is setting for his students.

If John Cisna wants to try to lose weight by eating at McDonald’s every day, fine—but it’s his responsibility to monitor his diet, not his students’. And teachers should be particularly careful about talking about dieting in the classroom given teens’ susceptibility to eating disorders and negative body image. Add in the pro-business political implications of Cisna’s project—“Hey, it’s choice. We all have choices; it’s our choices that make us fat, not McDonald’s,” he told a local news station—and you have what looks like the dissolution of appropriate student-teacher boundaries.