It’s sad but it’s true…we are currently living in a society dominated by large corporations that are literally trying to kill us. Rather than reinforce all the obesity articles and studies that are popping up on a daily basis, I’m going to leave the images to do the majority of talking in the majority of this blog entry.
As most of my regular followers know, I’m currently taking part in a no refined sugar experiment, given the ok by a nutritionist; 7 days in and the results are, to put it bluntly….shocking. I consume little refined sugar (or so I thought), in relation to the majority of the global population and I train a ridiculous amount. Scientifically the processed sugar I would have consumed would have been burnt off due to the amount of exercise that I do weekly. However in a week these are the results so far, merely by cutting out all refined sugars and sweeteners (the calories in my diet have not been cut in anyway) I have:
- · Dropped 3 pounds
- · Lost almost 2 % of my body fat
- · Reduced my metabolic age by 3-4 years
I couldn’t believe it myself. So why is it, that despite knowing that high sugar and high fat products are bad for us, we still consume them? It’s all down to marketing, particularly aimed at those of a younger age. Here are some examples of how marketing is being aimed at children, reinforcing those unhealthy behaviours at a young age, that are becoming harder and harder for those in the fitness and health industry to try and break, as generations keep moving on.
Here is another example of some fantastic marketing….slightly ironic aye????
Schemes are being put into place, and a lot of products now use the traffic light system, making sugar, fat and salt content in products easier to track. If it’s green it’s good, if it’s red, literally stop, put the product down and walk away.
McDonalds is one of the biggest culprits of faddy marketing. Constantly finding loopholes to the system, and providing stimulus to the rest of the food manufacturing corporations, to come up with fun and inventive marketing techniques that make bad food fun, and are producing younger generations like this:
This is one of my favourite pictures:
Here we have a lovely child eating a nice cereal breakfast. Ten minutes later, bouncing off the walls and driving his parents insane. How do I know that? Check the contents in the top corner of the cereal box. 11grammes of sugar before he gets to school, which is a third of an ADULTS daily sugar intake, say what now?!?!?! Why would you let your child eat that, someone please tell me!
Marketing is so deceptive, and makes shopping hard due to the constant visual stimulus encouraging us to buy these products. We often see products like this with the words “wholegrain”, “iron” etc etc yadayadayada:
What they don’t put on the box is “this product is stripped of all things that would look like food and pumped full of crap” because people wouldn’t buy their products. Here is another example of shoddy marketing, where foods are seen as healthy as they are “cereal” bars or “oat” bars.
Again these products have no representation, apart from the small print on the back of the packaging, that some of these “nutritious” or “diet” products sometimes have the sugar equivalent to a bar of chocolate.
These massive corporations are making temptation greater to eat these foods, but it takes a small amount of will power to turn around and say no. This may seem like I’m taking things to the extreme and over emphasising how bad these products are for you and your children, but just remember, I didn’t consume a lot of refined sugar to begin with, and look what cutting it out of my diet has done.
Just remember it's science and the stats don’t lie.
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