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Robin Stevens

Dr. Katie Bruemmer

Eng 101

04 September 2023

Health Advertising: What in the Fitbit!?

Hey Google, how do I clear my hormonal acne? How do I heal my gut? What do I do

about my caffeine addiction? How many steps should I be taking? Should I get a fitbit, should I

drink kombucha, take supplements? Sleep more, don’t sleep. Be a carnivore, go vegan, take these

herbs, work these muscles, intermittent fasting, sleeping in shifts, eat your greens, drink your

greens! Buy, Buy, Buy!That’s the solution of course! Buy more products to help you. These

products will make you better, healthier, cleaner, right? Well, maybe not. Health advertising has

been a problem for decades, and corporations use rhetoric, specifically an excess use of pathos,

to make you feel like their products will help you create the best version of yourself, but the

legitimacy of their claims is questionable at best. Health and fitness corporations claim that their

products will make you healthier as a whole through misleading advertising, and shoddy science

to back it up.

The misleading advertising primarily stems from an overuse of pathos, which

manipulates your feelings and disorients your decision making abilities

INSERT DATA FROM OUTLINE HERE!!!

This is relevant because we are seeing the brands appeal to your ethos primarily and are not

acknowledging the result of the rhetorics. We literally learned about how you need more than
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one to make a convincing argument and both of these brands are just making you feel scared or

sad. They are playing off of your emotions to make you feel like you are in a vulnerable state to

try and get you to buy products. (I will clean up this explanation girl I swear)

Along with the focus on your emotions, they are also lacking a critical aspects of an argument,

especially related to heath: logos (CLEAN LATER)

Now, It’s not a crime to expect users to really read the fine print, but it’s seriously

unethical to mislead and use big letters and buzz words as a substitute for scientific side effects

of your products, or as a distraction from the potential health risks it has.

INSERT DATA FROM OUTLINE HERE!!!

These are all relevant because it’s showing that the adversitzing is not lining up with the science

behind the products. The herbal energizers are dangerous for kids and against school sport code

and yet people are still recommending them to athletes. The blooms nutrition is not really that

awesome for you in the fruit and veg departments and yet it’s advertised as a green juice with

fresh foods on the packaging. The work outs that are claiming to help you get tones and make

you healthier, are quite literally hurting people because they aren't designed for the average

person to do every day like it’s being advertised as. Basically it’s saying we can’t really trust the

health industry because it’s promoting products that are at best not working and at worst being

harmful to its customers. (CLEAN LATER)

So what can we do to avoid being tricked?

INSERT DATA FROM SOURCES HERE!!!

Doing these things will help us be more aware of what is actually happening, and how the

products we are buying are going to make a difference in our lives. These tactics will allow us to
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be more informed and also see past the marketing ploys large corporations have to play on our

emotions and leave us in a vulnerable state, feeling like their product is the only solution.

(CLEAN LATER)

WRAP UP LATER WHEN I’M IN THE WRITING ZONE!!!

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New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Print.

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1998. Print.