Category: advertising

Advertisers are dried turds with little pieces of corn and peanuts.

Ever hear of Nutella?  The product calls itself a hazelnut spread.  When you taste it, and especially when you smell it, you can tell that it is not just chocolate.  But honestly, it is mostly palm oil and sugar.  It is more like sweet margarine spread than any kind of nut.  But to see the advertisements, you would think it was a health food.  I am certain that this company gets plenty of return on that tactic too.  It is unfamiliar enough to Americans that we can be forgiven for not knowing that it is really bad for your body.  The advertisers working for the company also know that.  If the TV spot is your only source of information, you are going to be fooled.

On a related note, you would have to be living under a rock to not know that ketchup has lycopene in it, and that this is an antioxidant.  The industry has paid millions to ensure that you do, and it is plastered over every bottle on the shelf.  Of course, the stuff is mostly made of corn syrup.  Make no mistake - ketchup is junk food that happens to have a single healthy ingredient in it.

I have a bag of bread in the kitchen right now that has "No Cholesterol!" in the corner of the label in bold print.  News Flash: Cholesterol is an animal byproduct.  For a loaf of bread to have cholesterol, it would have to be injected with it.  They could just as accurately advertise "No Shards of Broken Glass!" or "No Rat Turds!"

The news right now is all on about how coffee reduced the risk of some kinds of cancer in a study.  I give a month before the entire industry is deep into efforts to rebrand the stuff as health food.  This is the same stuff that has oodles of caffeine - a psychoactive stimulant known to have related health risks so severe that there is a political lobby to have it regulated.  None of this has changed, and yet I bet you that our kids will believe otherwise from the effects of advertising.

Damned scoundrels.