From Truth Dig: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_revolutionaries_feeding_the_obesity_crisis_20120617/
By David Sirota
Posted on Jun 17, 2012
Posted on Jun 17, 2012
Major
food corporations face a quandary. They are under Wall Street’s
constant profit-growth pressure, but they can’t substantially raise
product prices because the food market is so cost sensitive. Therefore,
to entice us to spend even more on eating, Big Food has lately been
trying to extend the biological limits of consumption by challenging one
of the most basic structures of American culture: the traditional meal
schedule.
For the last few decades, food companies had aimed their
marketing at single meals, pushing to inflate portion sizes. That
initiative was wildly successful. As the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention recently reported, the average restaurant meal in the United
States is now an unfathomable four times larger than it was in 1950.
That has translated into “Americans now consum(ing) 2,700 calories a
day, about 500 calories more than 40 years ago,” according to the
Atlantic Monthly.
One predictable result of this trend is an
obesity rate that’s poised to top 40 percent and that already costs the
nation hundreds of billions of dollars in additional health care
expenditures. The other result is that the super-size campaign has
become a victim of its own success. Indeed, food companies are coming to
realize that, in terms of per-meal product sales, they are quickly
approaching the point where the human body simply cannot—or will
not—accommodate any more calories in a single sitting. That has left Big
Food fretting about a profit-making path forward—and that’s where the
innovators at Yum! Brands come in.
Known for ignoring public
health concerns and pioneering weapons-grade junk food, this
conglomerate’s subsidiaries have most recently given us the
cheeseburger-stuffed pizza (Pizza Hut), the Dorito-shelled taco (Taco
Bell), and the “Double Down” (KFC)—a bacon and cheese sandwich that
replaces bread with slabs of deep-fried chicken. So it should come as no
surprise that with the three meals hitting their caloric max-out point,
Yum! Brands has been leading the effort to add a whole new gorging
session to America’s daily schedule.
The campaign is called
“fourth meal” and was originally launched in a series of Taco Bell spots
telling kids that “everyone is a fourth mealer—some just don’t know it
yet.” Now, new “fourth meal” ads are once again popping up all over
television, insisting that “sometimes the best dinner is after dinner.”
The ads are backed by an eponymous website and a “cravinator” smartphone
app that helps binge-eaters select their junk food of choice.
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