Advertisements

Have you seen the fast food advertisements on TV and in the newspapers? Are they all true? Are there things that they don’t mention in the advertisements or they put them in really small print?

Read the Fine Print

Take Subway, for instance. Their advertisements say that they have 7 subs with 6 grams of fat or less. What you don’t know is that you can only get a sub with 6 grams of fat if you don’t put all of your favorite condiments on them. We're talking just bread and meat! You only see this in really small type at the bottom of the advertisement where it says, "Addition of condiments or cheese alters nutrition content."

Boy, does it ever change! A regular six inch Subway Club sandwich has only 5 grams of fat with 297 calories. If you order the same sandwich with cheese and condiments (onions, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, peppers, olives, and mayonnaise), you get a sub with 40 more grams of fat and almost 750 calories! A Burger King Whopper with cheese has less calories and only 1 more gram of fat! So Subway’s advertisement for 6 subs under 7 grams of fat may not be a lie, but it doesn't tell the entire truth, either.

Watch Out for Cute Animals

Some fast food restaurants try to get you to come there using cute animals. Have you seen Taco Bell’s chihuahua, Dinky, the one that says, "Yo quiero Taco Bell"? Some people don’t like these commercials. A hispanic civil rights group in Florida is mad at Taco Bell because they are offended by the ads. The group is planning to boycott the restaurant and are urging others in the hispanic community to join them. Not only does this type of advertisement offend people, cute animals don’t necessarily mean that the food is healthy, either.

Watch Out for Toys

Fast food restaurants also use advertisements offering things like kids’ meals with toys from your favorite movie to lure you in. They also offer birthday parties at the restaurants along with those big play places.

It Sure Looked Better on TV

Have you ever looked at one of the advertisements from the fast food restaurants? They make the burgers on the advertisement really look like they’re "beefed up." When you go to the restaurant to buy the burgers, they sometimes look like they’ve been flattened, nothing like the ones in the advertisements! Are they fake burgers on the advertisements? Do you feel like you’ve been cheated? We’re not sure what they use to make the foods look so good in the advertisements, but we know the food at the restaurants sure don’t look like that.