When it come to our growth and health we have all heard the
phrase “you are what you eat.” More often than not however we think we are
eating something good for us, but we fall trap to marketers using sly words to
make something seem better. One instance of this stems back to 1977 when the McGovern report
came out. It was originally intended to say “reduce intake,” however the food industries
didn’t like that and had it changed to “consume more lean products.” From this
we had a brand new market take off, now everything was being labeled with
reduced fat. But what happens when we take the fat out of a product? Well it is
going to taste horrible, because we are so used to a sweeter taste. So what has
happened is companies take the fat out of products and replace it with sugar.
We currently have 600,000 food items sold in America and 80% of them contain
added sugar. That statistic comes right from the documentary Fed Up, which
everyone should watch. Let’s take a look at the first example here of Heinz French
dressing vs. Heinz fat free French dressing.
Did you catch the difference? Both dressings are 12g packets, yet the fat free one has three extra grams of sugar. Now I know you are probably thinking what the big deal is, it is just three extra grams. Well if someone is trying to lose weight they are going to buy the fat free because they are told it is healthier, when really it is just pumped with sugar! Next well take a look at these two peanut butters made by Skippy.
The one on the left is the reduced fat, and yet it has more sugar than the regular Skippy's peanut butter. Now I am not here to tell you that fat is better than sugar (which it is), but rather focus on how marketers can be misleading. I am going to slightly change gears here now and take a look at another huge problem with food marketing. First I want you to watch this commercial from Perdue.
The most important thing we can do as consumers is pay attention to the language company's use. In this case Perdue claims that all of their chickens come from "family farms" and "clean safe environments." Since the USDA verifies this we as consumers believe it, but I have one question for you. Does this look like a family run farm that has a clean and safe environment?
What is the big picture of marketing here? The point I am making is that
we cannot always trust the words we see. We as consumers are drawn to words
like “fat free” because we want to be healthy. Marketers know that we are going
to buy these items because we will feel good about ourselves eating them. Just
like we can be happy that our chicken came from a family farm and was raised humanely.
Marketers are always trying to use our emotions against us to make us feel good
about buying something. We need to be aware of this and always question what we are being sold.
Works Cited for images
Works Cited for images
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