For some reason, I decided to watch a random channel on television for an hour, including the commercials. It might be because I was reminiscing of the past when there was no TiVo or YouTube ‘ or it could be I was procrastinating big time on my 15-page paper.

As I sat there sipping my Kool-Aid, a public service announcement came on about obesity. Now is the time to let out a groan of disinterest; I’ll wait.

The minute I said ‘public service ad,’ you probably thought of the black tar-ridden lungs of smokers, drunk drivers in totaled vehicles and potheads living in the basement of their parents’ homes well into adulthood. These so-called public service announcements do everything to parade the dead in front of you in order to get you to stop being, as they would say, irresponsible.

However, the obesity ad I saw did no such thing. It was a man dropping off two blobs of fat at the lost and found desk (do those really exist?) and asking what they were. The man at the desk replied, ‘They’re love handles. Someone must have lost them by taking the stairs instead of the escalator.’ Now is the time to make a face of confusion.

Most public service announcements have that shock value and ‘I told you so’ quality to them. However, these obesity ads have neither. Not only do they not show a single obese person, but it addresses the problem of obesity by giving these helpful hints such as, ‘Looks like someone’s butt, they probably lost it playing with their kids,’ or, ‘Look at someone’s thunder thighs, they probably lost them playing in the snow with their kids.’ It seems creativity wasn’t available at the time these ads were made. It’s bad enough regular public service ads in the past have done nothing but give us a chance to go to the bathroom before our TV shows came back on; these new ones barely address the issue.

The federal government is responsible for these new anti-obesity ads. Now before you go on national television and claim George W. Bush doesn’t care about fat people, let’s take the time to investigate.

These new ads are part of the ‘Small Steps’ campaign funded by the government for more than $1.5 million a year, which is my salary here at Pipe Dream (except take the ‘$1.5 million’ away and replace it with ‘one cup of water’). Instead of following the traditional approach of telling you that eating too many Hershey’s Kisses will give you Type 2 diabetes and death, the ads attempt to offer achievable tips to empower people to make changes in their lifestyles.

Really? So it has nothing to do with Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, the Hershey Co. and the National Confectioners Association being a part of the ‘Small Steps’ campaign? It seems to me that these companies are the very problem of obesity in the United States with their addictive soft drinks and chocolaty goodness. This partnership seems to have a major conflict of interest that would probably dissuade the discouragement of the consumption of too many sodas and candy bars as the cause of obesity.

I have to admit that these new anti-obesity ads are a pleasant change from those hard-hitting public service announcements from the past, but they seem to have lost their message among the trite healthy tips they give. These ads sidestep the real causes of the obesity epidemic, which is the abundance of cheap high-calorie foods filled with sugar and corn syrup. Now if you’ll excuse me, the anti-obesity ad just came on the television again and I must watch it while drinking a Fanta Orange and eating cupcakes topped with candy corn.

And I’ll be taking the elevator in the library later.