Junk Food Is Like Heroin
At least that is what an advertisement titled “Break the Habit”, recently shown in Australia and now making the rounds on the Internet, wants you to believe.
Syringes And Burgers
I would have loved to give you the link to its video on YouTube, but it has been taken down, so all I can offer is a description: In the beginning you see a little boy sitting at a kitchen table, scribbling whith his crayons. His mom walks in, puts a fast food bag on the table, produces a syringe, heroin and tourniquet from it and proceeds to put the latter on her son’s arm. A caption then reads: “You wouldn’t inject your children with junk – so why are you feeding it to them?”
Junk Food is like Child Abuse?
Catchy, isn’t it? The producer behind the video, Henry Motteram, went even further and told ABC Australia that not resolving the signs of childhood obesity is “tantamount to child abuse”.
A heroin joint taken out?
Oh, please. There is one striking difference between heroin and food: I have to eat food to survive, but I don’t need to inject heroin. Nor is fast food dangerous even in small doses, as biochemist Dr. Rosemary Stanton points out in the above article.
I do not doubt that through intelligent marketing and sales campaigns junk food giants influence consumers to unhealthy decisions, but marketeers like the above agency sell a message just as flawed as the advertisements that make sugary cereal look healthy – they only come from the other end of the spectrum.
Organic Foods And Calories
For many people it has already become a dogma that “junk food makes you fat, organic food doesn’t”, where in reality an organically produced food can have as many calories as any other.
Fresh Healthy Vending, an upstart company that produces vending machines supposedly containing “healthy” snacks and advertising these especially for sales at schools, can serve as a practical example here. They decribe their offers as follows:
The Fresh Healthy Vending mission is to provide consumers with fresh healthy snack and drinks as an alternative to typically unhealthy junk foods found in traditional vending machines (…)
This is flanked through the use of promotional blogs that collect every scary message about obesity out there and repeatedly link to the supposedly “healthier” alternatives on the main site.
One of these supposed alternatives are their “Back to Nature” chocolate cookies, made with organic milk and sugar, no less. Yet they still contain 170 kcal per serving size, with one of these servings being 24 g. In comparison, a 34 g Oreo cookie has 160 kcal.
Organic Obesity
Organic foods are a big market. Some of the people and activities behind it may be filled with the best – perhaps just misled – intentions and maybe we can even count the heroin ad in there, but there also is a lot of money involved. If the field of educating people about nutrition is left to those that have financial interests or a lack of knowledge in it, it won’t matter if they produce organic or non-organic foods, the result may be the same: obesity.
Picture courtesy of Justin Cozart.
12 Comments
Yknow, I was on this one forum one day(never guess which), and this guy told me “as long as you eat healthy real foods you cant gain fat”.the example ^he gave was olive oil. I was interested in his argument(mostly for lulz), And now I read this(!) and see organic can be worse!? Who to believe :o?
Me of course! 😉
Seriously, if you managed to eat 3000 kcal worth of lettuce per day and only need 2500, you would even gain weight from lettuce.
No. Eating more calories in a day than your “requirement” will not make you gain weight. Only after a while, but not immediately.
Do you think that the weight suddenly appears out of nowhere? Don’t be misled by daily fluctuations and the inaccuracy of your scale.
They are burned in the metabolism. Over time, with little activity weight will accumulate.
Hello Evil!
Here’s a link to the “Break the Habit” ad:
http://www.bestadsontv.com/ad/31653/Childhood-Obesity-Break-the-Habit
And that is one controversial ad alright…
Ah, thanks! I wonder why they took it down from YT.
Junk food is so good to eat. The things that do not taste good for you taste too good to let go. I do believe that you should eat small quantities of junk food. Exercise and eating healthy is a good idea for long life.
http://thetruthisextant.wordpress.com/
It’s not that you SHOULD eat junk food. It’s that it’s BETTER to eat some junk food every now and again if you’re “addicted” already to keep from falling back into old ways.
Personally I’m glad I caught myself early, now I have an iron will and I hate junk food and soda. Although I am a very, very unusual case. 😉
man i just wish i could stop eating peanut butter. ha 😉
Hmm interesting advert! Of course Any food can be addictive.
We had a program here called ‘Honey you’re killing the kids’ in which a child-nutritionalist would interview a family and then analyse the way the kids were fed, exercised and treated regarding self esteem. The parents were often unaware that their child was affected at all by their own choices. It was quite hard hitting at times .What really irritated me was the ‘predicted effects ‘ photographs which were ‘aged’ and the ‘predicted life expectancy’. I thought it naive that they believed that ‘that’ was the exact way things would turn out BUT that was the element which persuaded the parents to change it all. At the end of the program they would re-predict the appearance,weight and life expectancy in another ‘aged’ photograph.If the parents had changed their actions, the picture was more favourable,if not, it was not (and the parents seemed genuinely distressed). Sometimes shock tactics really do work .
Interesting! And yes, if they aren’t overly used, “shock tactics” can work, as sometimes people have a hard time realizing the long-term consequences of what they do.