Personal Evolution

The Obesity Epidemic: The Result of “Advertising Conditioning” and an Unholy Alliance of Govt and Media

The Zio controlled media of Hollywood Movies and especially Broadcast TV have fueled horrific human suffering. In concert with their governmental agents, they have led us to trillion dollar wars, and the incredible thefts of the Zio Club FED as well as the seemingly invulnerable predator Banks such as Goldman Sachs. Yet, another aspect of Zio influence has harmed and killed even more people than their wars and predator banks. The Zio media is fueled by two major sources of money, advertising from food and big pharma. Food is the biggest player and is in fact the biggest source of money to the controlled media, and that is what I will cover today.

The obesity epidemic which is running rampant through much of modern society is the direct result of large commercial marketing campaigns which deliberately promote the most unhealthy—but for them, the highest profit margin—foodstuff to the unsuspecting public.

food-warehouse

While many people have recently become aware of the hoax of “low fat foods,” even that lie—promoted for many years—is still widespread, as evidenced by the large scale availability of all manner of “low fat” foods on supermarket shelves.

“Low fat” foods, for those who don’t yet know, do exactly the opposite of what they claim: by reducing the amount of natural fat in a diet, and replacing it with high doses of sugar (“fat free” flavored yoghurt being just one of the most widely-promoted culprits, as an example), these foods increase the amount of food consumed and spark insulin highs, which causes the body to create extra fat reserves, and not lose them.

But it is not just the “low fat” foods which are deliberately promoted to the general public by the large corporations.

A study published in Nutrition Reviews in October 2012, spelled out the problem as follows:

Food marketing is often singled out as the leading cause of the obesity epidemic.
The review begins with an examination of the multiple ways in which 1) food pricing strategies and 2) marketing communication (including branding and food claims) bias food consumption.
It then describes the effects of newer and less conspicuous marketing actions, focusing on 3) packaging (including the effects of package design and package-based claims) and 4) the eating environment (including the availability, salience, and convenience of food).

The bottom line is that large retailers were deliberately promoting foods which the scientific community knows is unhealthy, simply because of larger profit margins.

The Nutrition Reviews article continued:

Food marketers influence the volume of food consumption through four basic mechanisms that vary in their conspicuousness.

1) The short- and long-term price of food, as well as the type of pricing (e.g., a straight price cut or quantity discount), can influence how much people purchase and eventually consume. Pricing efforts are generally conspicuous and lead to deliberate decisions.

2) Marketing communications, including advertising, promotion, branding, nutrition, and health claims, can influence a consumer’s expectations of the sensory and non-sensory benefits of the food. 

The influence of marketing communication can sometimes be as conspicuous as price changes, but consumers are not always aware of some of the newest forms of marketing communication (e.g., “advergaming,” package design, or social media activities) and, even when they are aware of the persuasive intent behind these tools, they may not realize that their consumption decisions are being influenced.

3) The product itself, including its quality (composition, sensory properties, calorie density, and variety) and quantity (packaging and serving sizes) also influence in a variety of ways how much of the product consumers eat. 

4) The eating environment, including the availability, salience, and convenience of food, can be altered by marketers. 

Furthermore, the study pointed out, it is the sharp reduction in price of the unhealthy processed foods which are promoted to the general public:

With commodities, short-term prices are determined by supply and demand on world markets and long-term price changes are determined by efficiency gains in the production, transformation, and distribution of food rather than by marketers.

The most notable change in this respect is the relative steep decline in the price of food over the last 50 years, particularly for branded, processed foods that are high in sugar and fat, and for ready-to-eat foods, which are prepared away from home.

Yet most food products are not commodities; instead, they are branded products that are differentiated in the eyes of consumers thanks to the ways in which they are advertised, formulated, packaged, distributed, and so on. With these branded products, marketers can establish their own price depending on which consumer segment they wish to target.

Data from the 1984–1999 national Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System found that a 10% increase in prices at fast-food and full-service restaurants was associated with a 0.7% decrease in the obesity rate.

The study also found that the belief that price promotions “simply shifted sales across brands or across time” was wrong, and that instead, “it has now become clear that temporary sales promotions can lead to a significant increase in consumption.”

Marketers also reduce the relative price of food by offering quantity discounts with larger package sizes or multi-unit packs, which is a powerful driver of supersizing.

Although there are exceptions, most studies found that quantity discounts generally lead to stockpiling and increased consumption, especially for overweight consumers.

One study found that during weeks in which multi-unit packages were purchased, consumption of orange juice increased by 100% and cookies by 92%, but there was no change in consumption of non-edible products.

Overall, all the studies reviewed clearly show that pricing is one of the strongest – if not the strongest – marketing factors predicting increased energy intake and obesity, and this is why lower-income consumers are predominantly affected by these conditions.

The food industry is among the top advertisers in the US media market. Children and adolescents are exposed to increasing levels of television advertising, mostly for nutritionally poor snacks, cereals, candies, and other food with a high fat, sodium, or added sugar content.

As with all consumer goods marketers, food marketers are diverting budgets from television, print, radio, or outdoor advertising to more recent forms of communication on new media (including web sites, all types of video games, social networks, product placement, point-of-purchase advertising, etc.) and through packaging, direct marketing, public relations, and event sponsorship. The message communicated in these ads is that eating these foods is normal, fun, and socially rewarding.

To summarize how food marketing has made us fat, it is through increased access to continuously cheaper, bigger, and tastier calorie-dense food.

In other words, the large corporations have deliberately promoted unhealthy mass-manufactured foods because they provide the highest profit margin—and encourage greater consumption, even though the health effects on society are overwhelmingly negative.

The Zio media has grown fat and powerful on their advertising revenue, and they know that this advertising conditions millions of people to eat a diet exactly opposite of a natural, healthy diet that would give them health rather than obesity, diabetes and heart problems, cancers and the great killers and destroyers of human life.

There are rising voices in this struggle for healthy food but winning the battle is dependent on overthrowing the real rulers of media and government.