Few months ago I started affording fleeting attention to the plethora of advertisements plastered around my ‘Daily Dose’ site.

Some of them really are comical; seemingly based loosely around the content of my own articles these advertisements range from ‘Bicycle Repairs’ and ‘Auto Shops’ to ‘Fitness Classes’ and my favourite, ‘Foods to Never Eat’.

Favouritism notwithstanding the one that popped up on a recent article genuinely annoyed me; I am quite familiar with, and in many ways inured to, the aforementioned supposed doctor’s line of ‘Things to Never do’ narrations – flaunting a decidedly limited range spanning all the way from eating to exercising – but this particular ad was entitled ‘4 Veggies to Never Eat’.

I guessed this would be just another cliché-ridden, hyperbole-infused endorsement directed at that special variety of processed-food subsisting, once-in-every-three-day defecating, unequivocally-medical-profession advocating, slothful idiots who detest any food that doesn’t come tightly enclosed in a plastic wrapper and whose ingredients comprise more numbers than genuine food elements, and closed the page.

The thing is though, I have in the past succumbed to my innate curiosity and clicked on one of these ‘Never’ advertisements. It was a video detailing advice from a suavely dressed, sveltely accented, apparent American doctor, regarding the five foods to avoid ‘at all costs’ if one is having difficulty ‘shedding that unsightly excess’. I wasn’t surprised when fifteen minutes and three implicit sales pitches later, I had learned nothing of substance.

Suffice to say I closed the video before it had finished playing out, taking nothing from it but, importantly, giving up nothing either. I could only imagine how what I had just witnessed might be perceived by a weaker-minded, lazier-spirited and/or more gullible person looking for the easy way to deal with their, largely self-inflicted, woes. “Oh wow,” I imagined the person exclaiming, “this miraculous doctor so understands me, like he totally gets all of my issues, like, he totally gets me, and like, he knows how much I hate hard work, so like, if I go along with what he’s saying, oh wow, like, he’ll totally fix me!”

All he’s really done is use a heading that will prove eye-catching to those sorry folk out there who are searching for that easy fix to the issues and/or health concerns that have befallen them through a life of essential neglect by doing only what they want to do and at no stage would they be willing to do anything that goes against that doctrine of self satisfaction.

Ultimately he’s preyed on the weak. From there he will likely sell them a product or a plan or a product-plan that looks appealing and appears to go along with everything they’d always believed about nutrition in the first place…

It’s a crooked world.

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by Salep Hitch

Photography by Nev R Tua-Du