Scrumptious Junk Food Advertising

Known for its generous portion sizes and excessive salt and sugar content, the American diet could be described as more hedonistic than nutritional. The beloved drive-through, TV dinners and hassle-free snacks are all high calorie staples in the American diet that bring great pleasure to consumers. Advertisements for convenient fast-food or scrumptious junk food are displayed nearly everywhere. Since such profuse advertising results in a sense of familiarity, consumers are more likely to gravitate toward junk food seen on commercials as opposed to unadvertised health foods. For this reason, many American families choose to pick up a quick meal from a fast-food restaurant or eat a bag of chips rather than preparing and cooking a nutritional …show more content…
For example, devoted to maintaining that consumers continue to eat their products without growing bored of the flavors, the processed-food industry has utilized the phenomenon known as “sensory-specific satiety,” which is the tendency for distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain and depress your desire to have more, as a guiding principle (Moss 480). In other words, sensory-specific satiety is the gradual decrease of the joy and satisfaction felt when consuming one type of food until you no longer enjoy eating it. However, when exposed to a new, different flavor there is a revival of appetite and eating foods with a variety of complex flavors can result in eating more food than usual. The discovery of sensory-specific satiety has contributed to the success of America’s most popular snacks, such as Coca-Cola or Doritos, due to their, “complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating” (Moss 480). As a result of the elaborate flavors, these popular snacks successfully avoid sensory-specific satiety and encourage consumers’ brains to continue eating, regardless of the vast amount of calories the body is actually