"Skinny" kills

       Often in advertising, companies will use provocative and sometimes controversial methods of attracting attention to their products.  Behind the seemingly thoughtless and insensitive material they publish, there is always at least one strategy to attempt to gain more customers.  For example, in the Pretzel Crisps advertisement pictured above, the company attempted to sell their product by promoting the taste of their product as well as perpetuating the harmful stereotypes that haunt societies all over the world today.
       The Pretzel Crisps advertisement appeals to readers' physiological need for food, with a picture of a pretzel accentuated at the top of it.  It is made more prominent by being more colorful and interesting than the basic font of the words below it.  By doing this, the company attracted attention to their advertisement because all humans have the need to eat, so by ways uncontrolled by us, we are automatically drawn to it, whether we read the captions or not.  Just by including a picture of their product, Pretzel Crisps installed a reminder in the back of each consumer's mind that they taste good and are a worthy candidate for purchase the next time they appear in the aisle of a grocery store.  However, the picture of the pretzels is not the only component of the advertisement with which the company intended to sell their product; though it may be more visually appealing, the caption beneath it is what will remain in the readers' minds.
       The pictured phases "You can never be too thin" and "Tastes as good as skinny feels" appeal to consumers' subconscious need for affiliation; though it does not explicitly say that being thin will make a person more popular or prettier, it does say that thin "feels" good.  Rather than promoting the healthiness of their chips or the simple ingredients of which they are composed, Pretzel Crisps instead plays on the idea lingering in each consumer's mind that thinner is better and more beautiful.  By saying "You can never be too thin," the company may mean that you can never eat too much of their product, as a unique aspect of it is its width, but it also reminds the reader of the stereotypes that still fester in his or her mind, reminiscent of a time in which women were not to leave the kitchen and men couldn't cry.  You can, in fact, be too thin; according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, the death rate of anorexia nervosa is higher than that of any mental illness, and that, "The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of all causes of death for females 15-24 years old."  More than half of the US adult population are on a diet at any given time.  Many people suffering from such disorders are either attempting to lose or maintain their weight in an endeavor to still fit the impossible body standards set for both men and women, so interwoven in our society that an ad without a stereotypically beautiful man or woman is uncommon.  "Skinny" does not always feel good; when a person's body fat percentage is low enough and they are severely malnourished, their hair falls out in clumps, their body temperatures can't regulate themselves and as a result leave them freezing even in high temperatures, their bodies eat muscle tissue rather than fat, as they have close to no intake of food, the reproductive system comes to a halt, and the person is left physically weak and feeling like their stomach is eating itself.  Stereotypes kill, and the media that perpetuate them are just as deadly.