Well, the "strawman" responses are due to experience, mostly.

There are a few touchstones, knee-jerk attitudes or points of view that are a sure-fire alarm bell for a dyed-in-the-wool* radical leftist, and a violent hostility towards McDonalds is one of them. This goes far beyond the PETA animal-rights sub-category. McDonalds is, to these people, capitalism incarnate, the symbol of all that is wrong with Amerika. I can find almost as many websites showing Ronald McDonald as a fiend from hell as I can websites showing Bush as a chimp. This is especially true overseas.

It was not a coincidence that this guy picked McDonalds, although any fast food restaurant would have done the same job. And it's also no surprise that this movie would have gotten great acclaim from the Sundance crowd.

He's not trying to get the impression across that it's a bad idea to eat every meal at McDonalds for an entire month. A blithering idiot would know that. He's trying to give the impression that the food is bad, period. "See? It made me sick!"

If you go to his home page, you can get the Lectures if you want. Or here to read the articles. This article is pretty much a textbook example of the leftist view of McDonalds.

I submit that applying his rules (at least one of every item on the menu, three full meals a day) to almost ANY normal restaurant would have resulted in similar health problems.

*red, of course. ;)