Chocolate Busters: The Easy Way to Kick It!. Jason Vale

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СКАЧАТЬ between the two which I forgot to mention – both cigarettes and chocolate can be highly addictive. The chocolate companies, however, like their cigarette industry cousins, will naturally deny this until we are blue in the face, but somehow I don’t think it’s disputable.

      WHAT IS ADDICTION ANYWAY?

      Put simply, addiction is a mental and/or physical hook, hence the expression ‘hooked’. Addiction is an emotion and the emotion is fear. Any substance which creates the fear that life wouldn’t be the same without it, that you wouldn’t be able to cope with and/or enjoy your life the same way without it, is an addictive drug. So does mass-market chocolate fall into this category? You’d better bet your chocolate bottom it does.

      Now clearly addiction has its levels and I realize that not everyone who eats chocolate is like Maureen Young (the woman who used to get through 200 bars of chocolate a week), but the fact that so many people are buying this book because they want to stop eating it is surely proof of its addictive nature. I mean, even if you loved them, you wouldn’t need to buy a book entitled The Simple Way to Stop Eating Sardines if you wanted to stop eating sardines, would you? There aren’t any ‘sardine patches’ or organizations such as Sardine-olic Anonymous are there? Yet there are ‘chocolate patches’, there are people who run their lives with a Chocoholics Anonymous way of thinking, and there are thousands of people spending God knows how much on therapies such as acupuncture and hypnotherapy in an attempt to free themselves of their craving for chocolate. If it were their genuine choice to eat chocolate, then surely they could simply make a genuine choice not to eat it – couldn’t they? So is it possible that some Derren Brown-like activities have been at work to make people believe it is their choice when really they have been mentally hooked?

      With that in mind, I think the addiction part is pretty clear. Fortunately, 99% of the hook is mental, created by years and years of clever marketing; the actual physical withdrawal (if you can even call it that) you will simply not notice. However, like most addictions, let’s not underestimate the power of the emotional hook because it is this which drives the fear.

      

      FALSE EMOTION THAT APPEARS REAL

      The fact is the GODS, through clever emotional advertising, emotional conditioning and mood-altering chemicals (yes, there is a physical part), have managed to create a powerful and emotionally driven food. As such, people become mentally and physically ‘attached’ and in many cases getting rid of chocolate proves as difficult as ending a relationship; they literally feel fear at letting go and so are ‘hooked’. Luckily, the emotions created by the marketing and the chemicals are all false, they just appear real. After all, what on earth can possibly happen to you if you do stop eating chocolate? Your heads are hardly going to explode and you are certainly not going to starve. So any fears you may have about getting rid of chocolate from your life are completely false. That said, when something appears real it then is real to that person.

      The only way to kick the chocolate – and be happy about it – is fully to shatter those fears and see this stuff and its pushers for what they really are. With that in mind, let’s really start to unwrap the industry by taking a long hard look behind the advertising and conditioning before we unwrap the many layers of the product itself.

      One of the most famous lines with the word Mars in the title has got to be that from a very insightful John Gray – Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – but it’s still not a patch on the most successful one ever used. I don’t think there’s a single person, in the UK at least, who doesn’t know …

       3 A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play

      

One thing is undisputed – advertising works, especially when you are dealing in an addictive substance. And the chocolate big boys and girls spend an absolute fortune making sure their particular message stays in the forefront (and the depths) of our easily manipulated minds. Over and over and over again they beam the same messages into our computer-like brains, making certain that we download the information into our hard drives. Mars alone spends $400 million a year advertising in the US, Cadbury spends a whopping £250 million just in the UK. Each chocolate company does their utmost to make sure we never forget that ‘Nothing Satisfies Like A Snickers’, that when you have a break you should most certainly ‘Have A Kit Kat’ or if things get on top of you, you should ‘Take It Easy With Cadbury’s Caramel’. Each company cleverly links our emotions, sporting abilities and even good health with their product. And each company makes sure that we believe the hype.

      MARS SPONSORS MARATHON

      Mars paid $2 million for the worldwide rights to the Rolling Stones song ‘Satisfaction’ to help promote the company’s leading product – Snickers. But that is small change compared with the $5 billion they forked out to be the official sponsor of the 1984 Olympics. They also are a major sponsor in the football World Cup and, seemingly, will not miss any opportunity to link their product to something exciting and, ironically, sporty. This point was hammered home to me when I saw a friend of mine running on a treadmill in my local gym dressed as a Mars Bar. It turned out that Mars was sponsoring him to run the London marathon, a point which would have been made a lot funnier if the chocolate bar Marathon wasn’t now called Snickers! It took him over 5 hours to complete the race with buckled knees in what amounted to a Mars boiler suit. He explained how all the way around the streets of London on one of the hottest marathon days in history, he heard rendition after rendition of ‘A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play’ – how’s that for illustrating the power of advertising! I think Mars got their money’s worth – not only was their big bar in full view of the millions of spectators, but it was also featured on BBC TV, a broadcasting company which prides itself on the fact that they don’t advertise! And what sort of pay did he get for nearly knackering his knees for life and giving the GODS massive exposure? Forty-eight Mars Bars! Unlike my friend, Mars are in my opinion just pretending it’s all for charity, pretending it’s all for the greater good, but in truth it’s probably all bullshit. After all, the advertising opportunities at these sort of events must be the primary motivation for sponsoring them anyway. I’m not just picking on Mars here; most of the big chocolate companies are up to this sort of thing, especially the UK’s biggest brand of chocolate – Cadbury. In Spring 2003, ‘The Nations Favourite’ (their words not mine) launched a £9m campaign to persuade children to buy 160m of their chocolate bars in exchange for sports equipment for their schools – yes, SPORTS EQUIPMENT! They called the scheme – ’Cadbury Get Active’ and said their initiative would ‘help to tackle obesity’. They managed to do this through the Youth Sport Trust and it was endorsed by the Labour minister of sport Richard Caborn. Imagine if Benson & Hedges decided to encourage children to smoke in return for donating some money towards cancer research; would the health minister allow that as it will ‘help a good cause’? Cadbury even managed to get Paula Radcliffe to back the ‘Get Active’ marketing scheme. Paula is not just an athlete, but a super athlete. At the time of writing this book, she reigns supreme in the long-distance running world, almost breaking a new record every time she sets foot on a track. The link here is clear, eat this stuff and it will help you be a supreme athlete; it will give you energy; it will keep you going; it may even make you a star! Mind you, at least finding out that chocolate companies sponsor sports stars has exposed what Linford Christie might have had in his lunch box – two creme eggs and a king-size Mars bar!

      Cadbury not only recruit lean athletic stars to link the image of sport and health with a СКАЧАТЬ