Dr. Peter J. Weiss

My last post con­cerned the unhealthy envi­ron­ment that we’ve cre­ated for our­selves in Amer­ica.

Unfor­tu­nately it’s an envi­ron­ment that fos­ters behav­ior that makes us sick and teaches us that health­care is good for us and more is bet­ter.

Is this what we want?  How did we get these ideas?  Adver­tis­ing plays a big role.

You’ll prob­a­bly rec­og­nize that adver­tis­ing sur­rounds us.  Mar­ket­ing mes­sages have per­vaded almost every aspect of our lives.  There’s no escap­ing them!

But do you real­ize how well these ads work?  Make no mis­take; adver­tis­ing does influ­ence you.  Accord­ing to Stephen Garey a for­mer adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive writ­ing for the Cen­ter for Media Lit­er­acy, “…there is a direct con­nec­tion between a society’s (or individual’s) lev­els of expo­sure to adver­tis­ing and the lev­els of con­sump­tion.”

Mr. Garey knows — ads work.

Mar­ket­ing mes­sages have per­vaded almost every aspect of our lives.

So who’s pitch­ing and what are they pitch­ing to you?  After find­ing a list of the 100 largest adver­tis­ers in 2009 at Adver­tis­ing Age online, I decided to try to rate each firms as pos­i­tive, neg­a­tive or neu­tral from a health stand­point.

Some­times it was hard to decide, and I rated most com­pa­nies as neu­tral.  As you might expect, “neu­tral” included a wide vari­ety of com­pa­nies  — finan­cial firms, car com­pa­nies, con­sumer prod­ucts man­u­fac­tur­ers, and retail­ers like Wal­mart are exam­ples.

How­ever, I judged alco­holic bev­er­age firms and processed food pro­duc­ers as neg­a­tive for health along with health­care related firms such as phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers.

Very few com­pa­nies could be con­sid­ered in any way pos­i­tive for America’s health — Nike was one — Per­haps the super­mar­ket chains Safe­way and Kroger could be counted as ben­e­fi­cial sources of whole­some food, but what about all the processed food?  I decided to leave the super­mar­kets as neu­tral.

In the top 20, I rated no firms pos­i­tively and these six com­pa­nies neg­a­tively:

#5.    Pfizer

#6.    John­son & John­son

#10.  Kraft Foods

#17.  Anheuser-Busch InBev

#18.  Glax­o­SmithK­line

#20   Nes­tle

Now you can argue with me about this.  How can I rate Pfizer or John­son & John­son neg­a­tively?  Don’t they make prod­ucts that help peo­ple?

Maybe, but isn’t that what every­one in health­care says?  Yet don’t we also see that much health­care is unnec­es­sary or mis­guided?

That, as a soci­ety, more health­care isn’t help­ing us?  The aggres­sive mar­ket­ing of health­care is part of our prob­lem.

Col­lec­tively these adver­tis­ers have shaped our lives in ways that aren’t healthy for us, and then con­di­tioned us to seek health­care for our result­ing prob­lems.

But this is the world we live in, and it may not change fast.  You may never see as many ads for fresh veg­eta­bles as you do for beer or sleep­ing pills.  What should you do?

Rec­og­nize that you’re not immune to adver­tis­ing.

Pay atten­tion to your envi­ron­ment and real­ize how our con­ven­tional wis­dom isn’t always wis­dom, espe­cially if it’s arrived at uncon­sciously.

Avoid let­ting your mind be shaped by the mar­ket­ing depart­ments of large firms.  Real­ize that they wish to sell you prod­ucts and ideas that may be harm­ful to your health.

Focus on cre­at­ing a healthy habits and a healthy lifestyle for your­self.  Don’t worry if your choices are coun­ter­cul­tural — that’s how you know you’re on the right track!

You can do it.

NOTE: I’d like to thank my friend Steve Heuss­ner for sug­gest­ing I write about adver­tis­ing.  Steve helps com­pa­nies become more com­pet­i­tive through a health­ier work­force.