Voices from Mexico call to take soda off your holiday tables: the “Make Someone Happy” anti-commercial and Santa Claus resigns In the midst of the Christmas holiday season, throughout the world commercial messages drive consumers to shop and consume by referring to the joy of the season and the spirit of sharing. Coca-Cola is one company that has traditionally designed special marketing campaigns for the Christmas season, with happy images of Santa Claus, polar bears and families consuming Coca-Cola products. In response to Coca-Cola’s most recent Christmas marketing campaign entitled “Make Someone Happy,” the Nutritional Health Alliance in Mexico produced an anticommercial to inform the public of the sad daily realities that are attributable to soda consumption and to question how heartwarming consuming soda can actually be. Around the globe, the burden of chronic disease from unhealthy diets including soda and sugary drinks is growing. To date, 383 million people have diabetes1 and every 30 seconds2 someone has a limb amputated due to diabetes. The Global Burden of Disease Study3 informs us that 184,000 preventable deaths attributable to the consumption of sugary drinks occurred worldwide in 2010. In other words, 504 people die each day from drinking soda and other sugary drinks due to chronic diseases such as diabetes4 , heart disease and obesity-related cancers. For a population prone to diabetes such as that of Mexico, the situation is severe: Mexico has the highest burden of death associated with the consumption of soda and sugary drinks, with 24,100 deaths per year. Almost 12.1% of deaths from diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity-related cancers in Mexico are attributed to sugary drink consumption. Drinking one to two servings of sugar-sweetened beverages a day increases the risk of suffering from type 2 diabetes by 26%5 . In the face of these realities, the Nutritional Health Alliance received a special video message from Santa Claus, in which he announces his resignation. Since his kidnapping in 1931 by a beverage company, he is resigning from his captors; although he warns that another impostor make take his place, he refuses to continue to be an accomplice to the burden of disease and death from the consumption of sugary drinks and apologizes for his participation as an accomplice. Although soda has silently plagued our societies for decades, the Nutritional Health Alliance sends this message from Mexico saying it’s time for the grave consequences of soda consumption to be brought to light. The Alliance cautions families to stop normalizing the presence of soda on our holiday tables and in our daily lives all seasons of the year. Santa Claus resigns: bit.ly/1sPWs5k
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 21:29:01 +0000
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