On 17 May 1972, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Don Gorske had just bought his first car. He stopped at the McDonald's on Military Road and ordered five Big Macs. He has hardly stopped since.
The record
On 15 March 2025, Guinness World Records certified his 35,000th Big Mac. The previous milestones trace a curve of disarming regularity: about 23,000 in 2008, 25,000 in 2011, 30,000 in May 2018, 34,000 in February 2024.
Don Gorske says he has missed eight days in half a century - bad weather, work or family obligations. He keeps a stock of frozen Big Macs at home for difficult days. He now eats two a day, at lunch and dinner, generally does not have fries, skips breakfast and walks about ten kilometres a day. He attributes his consistency to obsessive-compulsive disorder: he has kept all his receipts since 1972, which is precisely what makes the record verifiable.
His health: what can be said, and what cannot
Questioned by Guinness in 2025, those close to him reported “normal” blood sugar and cholesterol at routine medical check-ups. A profile in the Los Angeles Times described him in 2018 as 1.88 m tall and weighing 88 kg, with “below average” cholesterol. He himself says: “I'm probably the only person alive who can eat Big Macs every day without any ill effects.”
The precise cholesterol figures circulating about him are not based on any published medical assessment, and are not repeated here. All these data are self-reported, or reported by his relatives; no independent medical monitoring has been made public. A single individual case, whatever it may be, does not constitute epidemiological data.
The “Super Size Me” counter-example
It was the documentary by Morgan Spurlock, shown at Sundance in January 2004 and released in cinemas on 7 May that year, that brought Don Gorske to the attention of the general public. The director puts himself on screen: three meals a day at McDonald's for thirty days, from 1st February to 2 March 2003, tasting every item on the menu, systematically accepting the “Super Size” option whenever offered at the till, and limiting his physical activity to about 5,000 steps a day. The film reports at the end 11 kg gained, cholesterol risen to 230 mg/dL and an accumulation of fat in the liver.
Gorske appears in it as the case that resists the demonstration: a man who eats Big Macs every day and maintains a normal weight and cholesterol.
The film itself has been debated. A Swedish study published in the journal Gut in 2008 showed that fast-food-type overeating sharply raises liver enzymes, without reproducing effects as severe as those shown on screen. In 2017, Morgan Spurlock acknowledged that he had consumed considerable amounts of alcohol during filming, whereas he had told his doctors the opposite - which reopened the debate on the origin of his liver damage.
The end of “Super Size”: what McDonald's said
On 2 March 2004, McDonald's announced the phasing out of “Super Size” fries and drinks from its more than 13,000 US restaurants, with complete removal by the end of the year. The timing fuelled an immediate interpretation - that the film had killed off the format. This widespread interpretation is explicitly denied by the company. Its spokesman, Walt Riker, told the Associated Press at the time:
“The driver here is menu simplification. […] The fact is we don't sell many Super Size fries.”Walt Riker, McDonald's spokesman, Associated Press, 2 March 2004 - original in English
Asked about the documentary, he added that the withdrawal had “absolutely nothing to do” with the film. For the accuracy of the timeline, note that the announcement came about six weeks after the film's premiere at Sundance, but more than two months before its cinema release.
This episode says something about the network: the decision to withdraw a sales format belongs to the head of the brand, not to the operators. It is the same top-down structure documented, on a completely different level, by the architecture of fees and rents, or by the way a franchisor set the temperature of the coffee served by its franchisee.
The Big Mac, beyond the sandwich
The object Don Gorske has been eating since 1972 leads a double life that his record hints at.
First of all, it is a trade mark. Registered in the European Union in 1996, it was the subject in 2019 of an application for revocation filed by the Irish chain Supermac's before the EUIPO, for lack of genuine use over part of its scope. The General Court of the European Union ruled in 2024: the trade mark remains protected for meat sandwiches, but not for everything its registration covered.
It is also a unit of measurement. Since 1986, The Economist has published the Big Mac Index, which compares the price of the same sandwich from one country to another to infer whether a currency is over- or undervalued. The underlying idea - purchasing power parity - is serious; the method, as the newspaper itself acknowledges, is rough and ready.