Well, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is trying. It's battling childhood obesity (Georgia is ranked second highest in the United States) with its new ad campaign, which has been labeled "grim" and "building a climate of hate" by critics.
The ads, which appear on the campaign’s website, strong4life.com, are modeled after blunt — but effective — campaigns attacking methamphetamine use and smoking.
In one spot, an overweight girl named Maritza says: “My doctors say I have something called hypertension. I’m really scared.” And in another, that ends with “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid,” a child named Tina says she doesn’t like going to school because the other kids pick on her.
Critics say the ads will further ostracize children such as Tina. In posts on the Strong4Life Facebook page, they accuse the campaign of building a “climate of hate.”
What do you think? Will that be effective?
Carrie Teegardin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the story: Link | Strong4Life website
The USA has become so PC touchy feely it makes me almost too nauseous to finish my third hot fudge sundae.... almost!
The preservation of self-esteem, even if it's built on fabrication is more important than real accomplishment and goals that are difficult to attain. The flip side of achievement is failure and if you are taught that you can't fail, you won't learn. Weight-loss is not easy. I struggle with it. Obesity in kids is a fact and its resolution requires facing facts as well.
Ignore the fast food and ready-to-eat lobby and tax the crap out of unhealthy food, but don't establish institutional guilt-trips like this. Shock tactics are middling at reducing smoking rates, but ratcheting tobacco taxes was and is a remarkably effective tool.
If you shame people, they'll just associate making healthy food choices with, well, agreeing with you. Who wants to do that?
As for obesity being a "fabricated epidemic," that's just reactionary hogwash. Twenty years ago, no state had over 20% obesity rate among adults. Today, EVERY state does. Things are changing, and it's going to result in unimaginable health-care costs when it really starts catching up with us.
Oh and Dennis X. Try and tease me into being skinny now and let's see how healthy you are at 60.
I know there are mothers who continually feed their kids because they think they are being kind and that overweight kids look healthy, but that is delusional and needs to be dealt with. If such parents were harming their kids health in almost any other way they would be in serious trouble. Imagine a mother handing her kids cigarettes or alcohol at the school gates - she would be prosecuted. Parents who over feed their kids are guilty of child abuse.