File This Under: Health

Ogilvy Thailand created this PSA to make smokers think about their choices.

I love how the tables turn on the smokers as they try to educate the children.  As a little girl, I watched my grandfather die of lung cancer.  I vowed, at three years old, to never smoke -- and I haven't!  It's baffling that people privy to the inevitable painful demise of smokers should purchase their own death.  I've never understood it, so I asked a smoker friend why they started when they knew what it would do.  "Because my friends were doing it," he answered.

Pardon me while I explode.

To relate this to food, it is very important to take social aspects into consideration when pondering health issues.  You cook (if you do cook) what your family made.  You learn your eating habits from them.  Then you go out with friends and choose food that will please your conditioned palate.  Your friend orders a drink, so you order a drink.  Your friend lights up a cigarette, so you light one up or take a drag or simply stand outside and suck up the secondhand smoke.   But this isn't a tirade against smokers.  Diets, for example, work much better when you're not the only one on them.  (Misery loves company.)  The same holds for exercise routines. 

It is much easier to be motivated when you're not alone.  We are such social creatures.