Killing you softly - the effects of toxic advertising

Author and critic Jean Kilbourne best known for her documentary Killing Us Softly explains how  subconscious messages in food and image related advertisements can have a negative impact on our self-worth and our relationship with food. 

According to Kilbourne, we can encounter up to 3000 advertisements per day and may spend a total of two years of our life watching commercials. Many of the advertisements we encounter centre on female beauty and weight loss.  We are bombarded by idolised images and unwanted advice on how we should look and what we should consume and do to achieve the ideal.  Even when we are ignoring the advertisements, their message does affect us subconsciously.  We end up comparing ourselves to these images and inevitably fail to live up to them.  It is often forgotten that those images are filtered and manipulated within an inch of their life. Kilbourne also called for greater transparency in the use of Photoshop in advertising and fashion spreads

What is worrying is that 50% of three- to six-year-old girls in the USA worry about their weight (unfortunately, it's not just the USA anymore).  On the island of Fiji, women and girls started dieting after the arrival of television, whereas prior to it, they had no idea that something was wrong with their weight in the first place.

Food is often promoted as a proxy for human relationships - for example, get a chocolate if you need a lover.  Food advertisements promote both bingeing and guilt, thus helping to create a compulsive consumer.

Kilbourne called for a transformation in the way we think about food. “The solution to obesity isn’t to make girls hate themselves,” she said. Instead of focusing on weight or BMI, they should be helped to turn their focus on being healthy and having energy. “If we learn to eat healthy, natural, preferably local food with pleasure, and if we exercise with pleasure, our bodies will get to the weight and shape and size that they were genetically meant to be.”   

One thing is for certain:  If we truly learned to do this, we would become a more conscious consumer and less likely to be influenced by toxic advertising.

For more information, visit: https://jeankilbourne.com/