Slashdot Mirror
Fast-Food Logos Burned Into Pleasure Center of Children's Brains
bbianca127 writes "A study has found that fast-food logos are branded into the minds of children at an early age, perhaps fueling the U.S.'s obesity epidemic. The study showed children 60 logos from popular food brands and 60 logos from popular non-food brands. Researchers found that, when shown images of fast-food brands, the parts of kids' brains linked with pleasure and appetite lit up. This is concerning because marketers tap into those portions of the brain long before children develop self-control, and most foods marketed to kids are high in calories, sugar, sodium, and fat."
Were there brands that kids would care about shown as well, or just brands that they happen to know? I don't really see FedEx lighting up the pleasure center in a kid's brain, but Toys'R'Us or Mattel might. Other listed logos from the study are the Target bulls-eye and the Energizer Bunny. I might expect the bunny to cause a little bit of pleasure, but the cuteness of bunnies is balanced with the boringness of batteries.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Its neither. We are evolutionary survival machines, look at the things that our ancestors did to survive. They sought sugars, salts, protein and fat. Any combination of those things is literally guaranteed to addictive to a human being. We are bred literally to respond to that combination. So what do fast food restaurants do, they server us huge helpings of sugar, salt, protein and fat. These things have survival value. Sadly, they are also killing us. The ugly part is that people are getting rich pulling the trigger, knowing full well its a trigger.
I swear the public doesn't get it. For 70 years, advertisers have been doing double blind studies on how to control and manipulate you. They go for your conscious mind, they go for your unconscious mind, they assault your pleasure centers, they know what frequencies in what order trigger certain centers in your brain. They are aware of when to target you by common daily habits and schedules. In short advertizing is a science with a cutting edge that make a scalpel look like a blunt instrument. They go after your biology, culture, demographic, political views, religious beliefs, you social opinions. Its one of the reasons we now see sound bite instead of meaningful campaigns. That my friends if the work of Wall street advertising as applied by politics which has degenerated into just one more product being sold to semi comatose mouth breathing pubic.
Yup, those sugary and fatty foods provided sustenance for those periods when food was scarcer, when your body relies on fatty deposits.
Super markets eliminated the need to hunt for food interspersed with periods of shortages, but the latent craving for those sugary, fatty treats still remained.
This is nothing short from mind hacking. There is only one way to beat them, don't watch commercials. Not an easy task though. This is why I stopped watch TV at age of 15 and thanks to adblock and similar addons I managed to remove them from my browsing experience.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
And no amount of advertising can force you to buy something. It can let you know that thing exists, but you still get to make your own choice. Humans are not mindless drones.
Advertizing influences us. We are social creatures who evolved to fit in with others. I garanty you - without any doubt whatsoever - that there are things you purchased that you would never have purchased without the advertizing. And if I asked you about it, you would have some sort of "reason" why you purchase that item - parroting much of the advertizer's "message".
People make most of their decisions based on emotion. Very rarely do folks sit down and do a cost/benefit analysis, pros and cons, etc ... about a purchase - it takes too long. It's easier and more gratifying for that quick indulgence.
The women who buy very large SUVs "because they have children and they need the space" - they have only 2. My parents got 3 kids around in a Chevy Vega. But these days people need gigantic light trucks for their TWO kids. Gee, I wonder what gave them that idea? Or let's look at the Mini in the States. When it first came out the advertizers had two very masculine men doing crazy shit with them. Why? They were afraid that the Mini would be considered a chick car like the Volkswagen Bug and the Porsche Boxster.
And there's religion - the most manipulative thing ever created by man.
No sir, we may not be mindless, but we sure are easily manipulated.
I believe that all you say is correct. Unfortunately, that also requires a lot of diligence and discipline from the parents. I have the impression that most folks are simply looking for an easy scapegoat:
Until folks fess up and accept take the responsibility, and realize that they have to take the difficult road, this won't change. Someone or something else will always be the fault for their children's obesity.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
lets blame advertisers for poor parenting.
Groan. Need I say more? *Groan*
This sort of response has always been stupid, in my view, but with the amount of knoledge we now have about nutrition, how we become obese, how advertising influences people etc etc etc, it is staggerign that there are still this sort of uninformed opinions about.
First of all, nobody is blaming it all on advertising - not least because there is a lot more going on than idiotic TV adverts. Like the fact that when you go to any shop (even so called health food shops) the ratio between sugary, fatty luxury snacks and appealing, genuinely healthy alternatives is something like one or two orders of magnitude, if I'm not much mistaken.
And secondly, blaming it on poor parenting or "lack of self-control" is just too much like blaming the victim. People make poor choices because they are not really given any real alternatives. It is so easy to blurt things like "just pull yourself together" - but do you even know how to do this? Can you teach this skill to others? Are you able to help people overcome their moments of weakness? If you know and cared, you wouldn't say this kind of shit.
Or we could just stop letting people blame their problems on others. Yeah, I'm fat. I know why I'm fat, I eat too much food. Do I care, yes. Enough to do anything about it, no. At some point every person has to take responsibility for their own choices.
21st Century Renaissance Man
On the other hand, I think people get really uncomfortable with the idea that advertizing has the impact it does.. the idea makes them feel less in control of their lives so they underestimate how much other forces actually do sway them. We like to think we are above influence, but we are not, and marketers know we are not.
This does not absolve us from personal responsibility, but it does mean we need to be more realistic about what effects us so we can take responsibility by working to limit or remove those influences.