This is Your Body on Fast Food

Posted on October 10, 2007 in Sugar and Fat

I don’t watch television except while I am on vacation, so the ideas and attitudes which get disseminated through commercials doesn’t get to me much. During this trip, I observed an interesting trend when it came to food commercials. With the exception of the campaign being waged by Quizno’s (promoting low fat sandwiches), there was a sharp discrepancy: people who ate fattening foods were never portrayed as fat.

You hear it all the time about the models with thin figures that make those of us who don’t have such bodily forms feel ashamed of ourselves when the product is clothing, but nothing about those who gorge themselves on trans-fats saturated burgers, pizzas, and the like apparently without ever putting on a pound. In the former case, we are told that the portrayals promote the comparitively rare disease of anorexia (hard enough, however, on those who have it) but we never hear the same people complain about how the food commercials promote the much more common and dangerous condition of obesity.

To put it succinctly: the bodies shown in most food commercials are those of actors or actresses who spend their time exercising, dieting, and generally keeping their bodies from becoming bloated. They are not realistic consumers of the product. Perhaps some truth in advertising should be demanded here? “This is your body on corn syrup.”

Damn, I just ate half a bag of chocolate. I’m one to talk.

[tags]body image, obesity, fat, fast food[/tags]