False advertising and the promotion of fat hatred, gummint division

[firecat]

In New York City, the health department made a scare-mongering ad saying that diabetes can lead to amputations. The ad includes a photograph of a fat man who appears to have an amputated leg; crutches are leaning on the wall behind him.

In the original stock photo, a man with two legs is sitting on a stool (and there are no crutches). The "amputation" was created by Photoshop.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/nyregion/in-health-dept-ad-photoshop-not-diabetes-took-leg.html

I don't care that much about the Photoshop thing, but what bugs me about the ad is that it encourages hatred of fat people. The ad purportedly communicates "If you consume bigger portions of sweetened soda, you'll get fat, and then you'll get diabetes, and then you might need an amputation." But it also communicates "If you see a fat amputee, you can assume that they got that way from drinking too much soda."

I'd like to take the 'shopped photo and make the guy's clothing look camo and change the text to say "The US is engaging in more wars. This can lead to amputations."

Comments

[firecat]

Brief quacking produced a fact sheet that says otherwise, but the statistics are gathered from hospitals and might not include injuries caused by the US military.

[selki.livejournal.com]

Ooh!  Quacking!  New verb!  And its mobile version came up automatically on my phone and looks great, and now I've added it as a search engine on my phone, too!  Thank you.

[firecat]

Yay, new DuckDuckGo user! Thanks for reminding me to put it onto my phone and iThings too.

[selki.livejournal.com]

Oh, I was using them already, but hadn't seen "quacking" as a verb, and I like it. And since I read your post on my HP Veer, I clicked on the quacking link and liked the looks of it there (mobile site). And I was describing this to someone else today, and they put it on their phone, too!