The Derailing of American Health Starts in Our Own Backyards

I saw a commercial about diabetes in which five children are used to describe the state of mind of whiny American kids everywhere -It is a play on the state of health of American children today. As soon as I heard one of the children plead, "Mommy, can I have some grease?" I knew exactly what they were trying to do. By using the actual request system (whininess) of children to parents in American society when they ask to go to places like McDonald's, Burger King or even Taco Bell, it makes it seem so real that our children are actually asking for bad health when asking to go to McDonald's. Not that it isn't. But I believe on another level that it's much more than that.

The commercial is a comment on the current state of not only the way in which we essentially feed ourselves "cancer" everyday with fast foods and other unhealthy foods we ingest, but to me it is a comment of the state of people's ill awareness of the societal flaws we have in this country.

This ad clues us to three things about our own society, even if they were only aiming for the first and foremost one.

1) Start at a young age teaching your children to eat healthy so that they won't grow up to be unhealthy overweight cancer-ridden human beings.
2) Parenting is hard when your children whine so much.
3) America has false advertising. We've become the land of the sick and the home of the depressed.

First, children have gotten used to asking heir parents for things because not only is this a rich country compared to almost every other nation in the world, but it is a selfish one. Secondly, through our own mottos, we can pretty much get anything we want, or so we think. But the methods of getting anything we want turn us into these whiny, narcissistic, hand-holder-outers who think getting anything we want is a given. That these things we want are not something we work for nor are they things that we necessarily need.