Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet

The Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet is something that I have heard about on commercials, however these commercials to me almost seem like a joke. The main reason why I think this is because of the little sub-notes that the makers of the commercial placed on each different shot. Right off the bat, just while she is introducing this new diet, the first sub-note reads, “her exceptional experience is based on average 1250 cal/day”. The average amount of calories a person should be consuming in a day is approximately 2000, so she is only consuming about 63% of the normal amount. On the second shot, it shows the 7 different options that are supposedly below 9 grams of fat. Underneath, it states that these food options are not low calorie foods, ranging from 150 to 340 calories each. This means that this woman was probably very hungry all day long. It says that she went on this diet for two years. She also says how her results are not common, which obviously makes this diet very appealing now for people who actually want to lose weight.

This Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet, I think, proves how desperate some people can be in attempting to lose some unwanted pounds. There are obviously better options of food available to help one lose weight, because Taco Bell definitely does not sound like the sensible way to do it. For example, eating fruits and vegetables or not eating greasy foods.

This also shows how much corporate selling power there is due to the fact that they can advertise Taco Bell as a dietary concept and people will believe them and go try it out.

Stuart Hall’s, “Encoding/Decoding”, can be related to this idea because when making this commercial, the producers “encode” this commercial with a message, which is basically the idea of a weight loss plan. However, with sub-notes like I showed above, and the fact that this weight loss is “not typical”, it makes people who see this commercial almost misinterpret it with respect to the original message the producers had in mind. I don’t think that this misinterpretation could really be avoided because they could not leave out those details. I just think that they should not even advertise the Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet as a diet at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ89JaxqVgI