Remix Food Ads to Highlight Health Effects

This hilarious satirical ad from the Onion uses the trend towards "extreme" themes in snack food and soda advertising (think Doritos and Mountain Dew) to deliver a striking message about health costs of junk food [click image to see Onion news brief article].

Onion headline: "New Snack Chip Evades Digestive System, Burrows Straight Into Heart"

The Onion article goes for laughs by posing the design of the chip to impact the heart as a good thing, which calls attention to the real negative health effects of such foods. While the Onion exaggerates the detrimental effects, inverting the typical exaggeration of positive effects, you could also have fun remixing food ads to simply tell the truth about the nutritional value of snack foods in the overhyped style of their ads. You could do this with print ads, rewriting slogans and adding images. Or, make videos of commercials for products that pitch their health costs ironically as super fun. This would make a great media literacy lesson in health and science classes for middle school or high school students. Ads could be posted in hallways or online.