This ad has been showing on Spanish television for awhile now and, everytime I see it, I get really annoyed. The girls are saying “I’m smarter than hunger” (hunger = hambre) and with close up shots of their eensy-weensy bums they encourage hungry women to eat “30 delicious calories” of puffed corn crap with virtually no nutritional value (1 cake; Calories: 30, Total Fat: 0.2g, Carbs: 6g, Protein:0.7g). I doubt most women would fall for this bullshit, but what about impressionable teenage girls? Which I am sure is Bicentury’s intended target market.
I admit that I tend to find most advertising geared towards women offensive, but this one takes things too far by appearing to promote anorexia. There’s no mention that this product is an occasional snack option if one is on a weight loss programme. The ad just blatantly flaunts stick-thin models boasting about how they beat hunger. Sick.
In reality, a nice crisp apple would make one feel less hungry than two air-puffed corn cakes. Same calories, but with way more natural goodness. Here is the nutritional content of an apple…
I rest my case.
casa azahar 
That’s incredibly creepy, especially since starchy corn products are probably one of the prime ways people put on extra fat. Also creepy is the whole idea that something is wrong with actual hunger and it has to be outsmarted.
I had a thirteen year old guest last night who is already obsessing about her weight. She knows where to find all the websites that tell you how to succeed at anorexia even though she insists she does not do the things they suggest, meaning either she’s BS ing us or has a morbid fascination. Meanwhile, she has absolutely no interest in basic health — unfortunately she comes from a household where no one respects a normal sleep cycle, which is probably one of the major things people do to screw up their metabolism. There are IMs to send! Anime conventions to go to! And sometimes, it seems like, just a need to prove she can stay up all night.
I once found her watching a teen-aimed TV show in which the big plot pivot was girls substituting a weight gain bar for the diet bar in the lunch of the girl they didn’t like.
This is all starting to get incredibly sick.
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What sledpress said in trumps. Plus, if you check out the glycemic index of corn, you find that even if that little snack has only 30 calories, it will spike your blood sugar due to the GI and then when it crashes you’ll be wanting. . . wait for it . . . another snack!
I go for the apple. Tastes better, and lower glycemic index too. But, but — OMG! — it has almost twice as many calories as the corn product!
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Oh, and Jim hardly allows me to watch commercials because they annoy me so much and then I start declaiming at the TV. It isn’t just food ads either, makeup and hair dye and clothing ads piss me off on a regular basis.
“Hummer, like nothing else”. GRRRR screech where is my rocket launcher when I need it?
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This is why I have no television…
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I recall watching this morning “home show” during the “butter is the Devil” years.
There was a recipe for a something that would feed 10 and had OH MY GOD! a whole tablespoon of EVIL butter! The hostess of the show just about had a fit of apoplexy! She wouldn’t shut up about “all that butter!”…. Seriously.
Of course, she was a twig and was always going on about how she was trying to reduce the “fat” in her childrens’ diets to nothing when, in fact, people, especially children need some fat in their diet.
She as also “concerned about the weight of her children” who were, as anyone could plainly see, perfectly normal children.
Whenever they had any guest on the show who suggested a normal healthy diet for children, she was always asking them for ways to reduce the fat in her childrens’ diets and just wouldn’t hear it when she was told that children, especially, need some fat in their diet.
I recall a study done some years ago that had followed the lives of people who were up to 15 pounds under the “recommended” weight and those people who were up to 15 pounds over the “recommended” weight. They found that people who were up to 15 pounds higher lived longer and happier lives than those who were in the opposite category.
Part of it was that their health was impacted by fact that their bodies were not getting enough nutrients but it was also because many tended to obsess to the point of mania about “getting fat” and reduce the necessary calories in their diet and to over-exercise.
This is not to say that being fat is healthy. I know that I am fat and that it isn’t healthy. But all those people who obsess because they “look too fat” when, in fact, they are a perfectly normal weight do themselves as much harm as those who are too heavy.
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I had no idea European TV ads were as trashy and deceptive as American commercials. This could run in any major market over here and for exactly the same reasons.
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Amusingly enough, it was a decade of battling hunger and eating crisps and crap that caused me to just give up on diets altogether. Instead, I tried TCM. I stopped eating dairy foods and WHAM! lost a third of my body mass. Just like that. I eat chocolates and fruit, red meat and fish, junk food and health food as much as I want and still stay what my family considers too skinny (BMI of 21).
My point? Weight-loss is rarely achieved by battling hunger but rather by changing one’s nutrition in a comfortable way that would allow them to be healthy and happy and maintain a healthy weight.
As for the ad, I personally choose to ignore the product they try to advertise and look at it as a man would, perhaps.
To me, it seems they are vigorously advertising the back sides of Spanish models. Not much there, but still a nice view. I will be sure to pick up a model-butt for my living room coffee table the next time I am at the supermarket. The Hambre brand.
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Hmmm. I’d have to go hungry. Unless there’s a banana on offer?
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Yep, I’m another one who starts ranting at the TV when I see things like this. And I never buy or read ‘women’s’ magazines for the same reason.
Seriously, if we’re going to censor ads for their violence or bad language, surely this kind of message is just as destructive?
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Well, we ALL know what we would look like if MEN had their d’ruthers….
Sadly, there are women out there who are doing all sorts of crazy things to their bodies –like bleaching their…. um…. “bums”, carving themselves up, and having things inflated like bouncy castles…. because they are convinced that it is “sexy”. Unfortunately, more and more younger and younger women are convinced that they HAVE to alter themselves in order to be attractive.
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“Seriously, if we’re going to censor ads for their violence or bad language, surely this kind of message is just as destructive?”
Unfortunately, there are women who think this is “okay”. Was in in your blog, az, that there was the ad for Calvin Klein for the “orgy”?
On one site where they were discussing it, a young woman thought that this was “normal” all across the United States” and that “people have threesomes all the time”. Anyone who thought the ad was offensive or demeaning was old fashioned.
Kids of 10 and 11 try to dress “sexy” (their words) and think this is okay. They try and emulate women in their mid 20s because they don’t understand that their are children and parents don’t teach them any differently.
Where was it I saw the news article about the mother and daughter who look like sisters and the mother allows her daughter Botox treatments at something like 15.
Sickening.
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And when I say Look like sisters” I mean they both look 57, not 18 and whatever age the mother looks.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1187380/I-bought-daughter-Botox-jabs-18th-birthday–says-mother-spent-45-000-plastic-surgery.html
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The mother is 49 and looks older than me by a decade, and I an 52.
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Not “for” and orgy. WITH an orgy…
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That was on my page: “Stop Presses…” If that was an orgy I am a speed skater. It looked like the collapse of four metrosexual jeans models after a hard runway show and ingestion of Valium.
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You beat me too it!
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Nope… it was Sledpress
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Speaking of trying to look sexy…
Does ANYONE think Britney looks “sexy”? I wouldn’t even go as far as to say “trashy”. Explosion in a circus, maybe.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1197622/Who-ate-croissants-Britney-Spears-looks-distinctly-fuller-figured-hits-Paris.html
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Britney always looks trashy. What’s annoying to me about that article you posted, Mudhooks, is how it harps on about how FAT she is. Ridiculous.
I remember when Beyonce had a luscious figure and looked fabulous. Now she looks like all the rest of them – standard issue, over-processed, mainstream concept of “beauty”.
That “botox mother” looks like they just dug her up. Ewww.
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I eat something similar at work, though they’re made of rice, not corn. I find them a good way to still snack yet by-pass all the chocolate bars, cake, candies and chips people leave lying around from time to time for colleagues to get fat on. Let’s face it. If you take in more calories than you expend, you’ll gain weight. But don’t say that over at Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose, or you’ll be accused of heresy.
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i realy like your blog its very nice information **my blog speak about weight loss and health and fitness
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This jerk who commented spamming for his weight loss site also spammed on a body image blog post I wrote elsewhere on the Web! What an obnoxious person. You should delete his comment, as I did.
Great blog post, Azahar! God bless you in your journey.
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great read that ad was sickening though
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And they taste like cardboard, too. I’d rather have the apple. The models are also cardboard.
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I’m sick of people telling me its just a phase when I know people out there dying from eating disorders! Lend a hand; don’t avoid the problem people.
http://www.eatingdisorder.com/anorexia-nervosa.html?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=pv&utm_content=zs&utm_campaign=anorexia
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Pingback: fat is not fun « casa az
Just saw this quote on Twitter…
“Eating rice cakes is like chewing on a foam coffee cup, only less filling.”~ Dave Barry
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