As part of the fight against obesity, research is being conducted into the effect of warning photos on sugary soft drinks, I read in the newspaper. These are pictures of, for example, a foot affected by diabetes, blackened out, or a fat heart.
Such scary pictures have been on cigarettes for a few years now. I seem to recall a study that showed smokers are more startled by pictures of a wrinkled face than by blackened lungs or a horrific deathbed. I think that’s because people secretly tend to think they’re immortal. They would prefer to sit out that supposed eternal life with a wrinkle-free skin.
How does that work with soft drinks? The biggest soda abusers are teenagers. They don’t think about illness or death at all. The worst thing a teenager can imagine is social exclusion. Maybe they should put pictures on that soda of a fat, lonely teenager in a corner with a can of Coke; in the background a horde of beautiful, enamored teenagers who are all cheering together drinking large glasses of water.
I thought back to my own adolescence. My mother objected to Coke. Not because it would make people fat, because they didn’t get that then, but because it was ‘chemical junk’. The story that you could use it to unclog toilets and remove rust from nails was already doing the rounds. Coke was also ‘expensive’ and bad for the teeth. Tooth decay was the obesity of the 1970s.
After the persistent whining of her three children, my mother decided: from now on we would get one family bottle of Coke every Saturday, for the three of us. ‘But I don’t like Coke’, my sister shouted indignantly. ‘I only like 7-up!’ And what did my mother do then: she bought one bottle of Coke and one bottle of 7-up. Every Saturday.
The consequences were horrific. My brother and I claimed our fair share of that 7-up, in addition to that Coke, while my sister defended ‘her’ bottle tooth and nail. If we had a belch of civilization, things would sometimes turn out well, with glasses being poured along a ruler and scary smiles back and forth. But most of the time it was just sneaking out of that bottle when my sister wasn’t paying attention, followed by screaming and stomping. To get us back, my sister drank the Coke anyway. The atmosphere was cut every weekend.
I left home very young, after which the problem was solved. My brother is still grateful to me for that. And my sister supposedly still doesn’t like Coke.