Diabetes health campaigns often try to shock you with wellness-warning images of patients with amputations, but now it has been revealed that one such provocative campaign highlighting the connection between type 2 diabetes, portion sizes, and obesity has been digitally altered to fit the ad’s message.
The New York City Department of Health’s advert shows three full cups of fizzy drink arranged in size order, diagonal line labelling them as the smallest cup as ‘then’ and the largest as ‘now’. Behind this there is an overweight man whose right leg has been amputated at the knee and his crutches lean against the wall behind him, and a red banner reads, ‘Portions Have Grown: So Has Type 2 Diabetes, Which Can Lead to Amputations.’
However, the man in the photograph is not, in fact, an amputee; but instead, the advertising agency digitally removed his right leg at the knee. The photographer who took the picture doesn’t know who the man was, and so it’s also not known whether the subject of the photograph actually has diabetes. This is unusual practise for the New York City Health Department, as their previous campaigns have used real people coping with medical conditions, including ex-smokers who had lost their fingertips or contracted throat cancer.
Yet when John Kelly, a spokesman for the department, was asked about the controversy, he simply said ‘Sometimes we use individuals who are suffering from the particular disease; other times we have to use actors.’ The risk of amputation to your wellbeing was meant to be an extra factor, on top of the campaign’s overall message that reducing portion sizes can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity and poor eating habits.
According to Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, ‘These are hard-hitting images because we really felt we need to drive home a point that large portions are not completely benign’. However, not everyone agrees that this is the right way to go about things, and the American Beverage Association, which is a trade association representing non-alcoholic beverage manufacturers and distributors, accused the department of using ‘scare tactics.’
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