What we're discovering when we look at food ads & feel appalled is that our new healthier habits have taken us WAY out of the mainstream in our culture.
And isn't that somehow deeply saddening?
But we had to do it & it's not worth going back to.
Such perfect wisdom. Bravo saef. Bravo.
It is INCREDIBLY sad how unhealthy American eating habits are. They're starting to creep over to Japan.
More and more kids are overweight here - the 30s-40s generation of women are all 100-120 lbs or thereabouts, but the high schoolers and twentysomethings are a bit thicker (still mostly healthy/thin though!). I see teenagers lined up to buy corn dogs and fried chicken for breakfast at 7-11. They eat their packed lunches from home during class and buy fried crap and processed bread in a bag at lunch from the cafeteria.
The "Japanese Women Don't Get Old Or Fat" thing isn't going to last forever...
It seems anything that is about vegetables or fruit is about hiding them in other foods so you trick your family into eating them.
Those commercials for tomato sauce with "hidden" vegetables always make me feel so sad for the tomatoes. XD Because they're a fruit/vegetable too, but apparently they don't get to be in the same group with all the stuff that's being hidden. It's like they're being separated from the other vegetables, just because they're different. :'D
That's seriously what I think when I see those, I don't even know haha. But it really is sad how advertisers seem to have the mindset that healthy things need to be hidden in order to be edible.
For ads, I think it is Pizza Hut that calls pizza happiness. Hmm. The only thing Pizza Hut ever got me was fat, sick to my stomach and thirsty.
Last night, I went to go buy some V8. The juice aisle was two shelves and there were at least 100 different kinds of pure sugar juice and a tiny section with V8. I looked at that and thought about how many parents buy their kids apple or other fruit juice thinking it's healthy?
on a different note, i absolutely HATE beauty ads. I think taking a picture of an already beautiful girl and photoshoping the crap out of it should be illegal. that’s false advertising. i think models on the whole are too skinny. I think there is far too much emphasis on youth=beauty. Fine lines, just like curves, are womanly and should be celebrated: they mean you’ve lived a little.
I like what Dove is trying to do, and I hope their real beauty campaign is the first step in much more progress to come.
My current least favorite ad is the one that implies that children will NEVER eat whole wheat bread unless you smear Nutella on it. 40% of the calories in Nutella come from PURE SUGAR!!! Let's take some sugar and spread it on some carb...mmm, healthy breakfast for the kiddos!
I hate ALL of the "don't tell the child it has vegetables!!" ads. There is nothing wrong with eating vegetables, and no law that a food with vegetables will be automatically declared inedible by any child.
YES!!! Granted, the kids and I don't watch a lot of TV, but occasionally we'll catch some awful stuff. A few of my hates:
- Bratz Dolls and all the dolls like them: Sure. Great. Show your daughter that they have to look sexy, act sexy and care only about their friends and fashion. My husband saw a commercial about a doll, it was a copy cat of bratz I think, and he flipped. He said the entire commercial was sexually suggestive, even the lyrics to the song playing, and it showed cartoons of the dolls strutting around in short skirts and inch-thick makeup.
- Fast food commercials: McDonald's tries to go on about how healthy it is, but everything is STILL loaded with preservatives, sugar and sodium. Some places, like Hardees, KFC and Sonic actually PRIDE themselves on how much they can cram into one sandwich or meal. Burger King has a SINGLE SANDWICH covered in fried onions and BBQ sauce that has over 900 calories in it. One. Single. Sandwich. That doesn't count the fries and drink. Yet in the commercials they make all that stuff look and sound so good, like you're totally missing out if you don't cram that nastiness down your gullet.
- Sunny Delight, Chef Boyardee and hamburger helper: Well, pretty much all super-processed foods. My son saw an advertisement for canned ravioli once. The kids in the commercial were all running to this one kid's house because *his super cool awesome mom* was letting him have ravioli after school. My son BEGGED and begged and begged for me to let him have it. Finally I said fine, and he gagged after the first bite. Same with all the hot pockets, pizza rolls and pop tarts. Those are NOT after school snacks. In fact, if you go to the Hot Pocket's website and look at the nutritional info, it has the following paragraph: "Good in so many ways. There's more to the HOT POCKETS® brand than just great taste. More than 30 varieties have 0 grams trans fat per serving and contain 7 essential vitamins and minerals. And a number of our varieties of HOT POCKETS® brand sandwiches are stuffed with REAL CHEESE, to give you more of what you're hungry for. So, whether it's part of breakfast, lunch or dinner, remember ...anytime is a good time for HOT POCKETS® sandwiches!" But it doesn't have ANY of the nutritional information available on their site, so unless you go to the store and pick one up, you won't be able to tell what the sodium and calories are.
This is long and very ranting, but this is the reason why my kids don't watch any television that isn't pre-recorded to fast forward through the commercials.
My current least favorite ad is the one that implies that children will NEVER eat whole wheat bread unless you smear Nutella on it. 40% of the calories in Nutella come from PURE SUGAR!!! Let's take some sugar and spread it on some carb...mmm, healthy breakfast for the kiddos!
And lets not forget that a fatty sausage cheesy biscuit keeps you and your child fueled for the whole day, and if not, a bite of chocolate sugar coated fiber will make him smarter in history.
I know they are targeting people who would normally not give their kids breakfast (although I would like to think the majority of kids without breakfast come from a financially strained household, not just poor planning), but still.
I hate the hidden vegetables ads for all the reasons above.
Just wanted to add that concerning the idealized beauty standard, there's a group of girls in a Texas High School that are making the news. They've started a campaign to not wear makeup to school one day a week. They wear T-shirts that say "Redefining Beautiful, One Girl at a Time". Six girls started it, they had 12 for the first "no makeup" day and now there are over 180 girls signed up. It's spreading to other Texas schools as well. Now that's there's been national news coverage, we could see more. They're also focused on being self-confident without the makeup.
