With a newfound exercise obsession, Coca-Cola and other
companies are trying to shift the blame for what they're doing to our health.
New rule (as Bill
Maher would say): If you make billions of dollars a year selling unhealthy
food, you don’t get to tell us to work out.
It was one thing when
Cookie Monster began telling kids to eat vegetables. Cookie Monster doesn’t
earn a living by selling cookies, and vegetables are a fantastic alternative to
cookies.
But it was a totally
different story when Ronald McDonald went all Richard Simmons on us, visiting
schools to tell kids to work out.
Exercise is a great
idea, but it’s not diet advice. Yet this is a frequent tactic of many of the
corporations that rake in profits by selling us junk.
Take Coca-Cola’s
shameless new fitness campaign. “Are you sitting on a solution?” asks a
photo on the company’s website, depicting two people cuddled up, sitting on a
beach. The thing is, they’re drinking the problem: Coca-Cola.
Let me translate Coke’s new campaign into plain English: “Don’t blame us for America’s public health crisis.” The company is also asking you to not notice that while theAmerican Heart Association recommends no more than six teaspoons of sugar per day for women (nine for men), a single can of Coca-Cola has nearly 10 teaspoons of the sweet stuff.
Or maybe this is what
the ad campaign is really saying: “Please ignore the fact that, over the years,
we’ve sold our flagship product in larger and larger containers. Just exercise
a bit more — here, we’ll even help with some tips — and then you won’t notice
that our product is terrible for you. Keep drinking Coke, and don’t regulate
us.”
That’s the message,
anyway. And what’s more pathetic is that some folks are falling for it.
The BlogHer
conference enthusiastically announced that its sponsor, Coca-Cola, will help
attendees stay fit by giving out free pedometers as well as other prizes like
yoga mats and jump ropes. (Yeah, and I bet Coke will help attendees get Type II
diabetes by serving them Coca-Cola.)
As far as our bodies
are concerned, eating well and exercising are not an either/or thing. Nor is
avoiding smoking, managing stress, getting enough sleep, or brushing your
teeth. A healthy body requires all of the above.
So let’s leave
exercise out of it and talk about diet. The average American drank 401 servings of Coke products in 2012. Sure, that includes juices, sports
drinks, and water, but Coca Cola’s top four brands — each bringing in more than $10 billion
in sales per year — are all soft drinks.
McDonalds’ top sellers
worldwide are french fries and Big Macs, but even the fast food giant’s “healthy” offerings tend to
be terrible for you.
Many Americans enjoy
these unhealthy foods and beverages. And yes, drinking a soda or eating some
nachos once in a while won’t kill you.
But these days, eating
anything but junk can feel like an uphill battle. Healthy food is often more
expensive, more perishable, and, well, less addictive. Not to mention less
available 24/7 through a drive-thru.
Unhealthy diets have
reached the point of a public health crisis. And while there can be debate over
the role food companies have played in causing the crisis, it’s clearer than
Sprite that they’ve profited from it.
The purveyors of junk
food and fast food know they have some responsibility too. That’s why they are
so worried.
These companies are
trying to shift the blame. They want you to believe that it’s your fault that
you didn’t run a marathon to burn off the calories from your meal at Taco Bell.
OtherWords columnist Jill
Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org