It Puts the Pill in its Mouth

"Taking vitamins used to be hard" announced a television commercial I watched recently.  I found myself nodding in solemn agreement with this statement.  After all back in the day one would have had to hunt the necessary animals, harvest or gather the specific crops and then select just enough of each to have the appropriate vitamin intake for healthy human life.  And that was before one factored in raids by rival tribes, plagues and incipient ice ages.  Frankly its amazing anyone managed a well balanced diet in those days particularly as nutritional science was in its infancy.

But the television commercial wasn't referring to that.  Oh no, they were bemoaning how difficult it was to stick a vitamin tablet into your mouth and swallow.  Apparently this was a task beyond the abilities of most normal human beings.  People were dying of malnutrition as they pawed feebly at a mess of vitamin tablets on a table utterly at a loss as to how to get the tablets the final few feet of the journey to their bodies.  Mothers gazed helplessly down at starving babies.  How to provide the nourishment their beloved child needs?  They know it has something to do with the mouth, perhaps if they post a photo of the mouth on snapchat the baby will recover.

This advertisement marks a watershed.  Advertising companies have thrown off the mask.  They've always behaved as though their customers were gullible morons (to be fair their success would indicate a good degree of accuracy in that assessment) but now they are simply coming out and telling their customers that, literally, they are too stupid to eat without assistance.  And obviously they don't expect their customers to bridle at the assumption that swallowing a vitamin pill is beyond their intellectual and physical capabilities.  Now our vitamins come in a convenient gummi form which, presumably, is easier to stuff in ones gob and then swallow than the user unfriendly shiny capsule of yesteryear.

Here is the thing about medical and pseudomedical advertising (and it doesn't get much more pseudomedical that gummi vitamins).  It is designed to scare us.  In order to sell us health stuff the advertisers have to persuade us that we're unhealthy or, at least, that our health could be better.  Therefore the hidden subtext of such advertisements is that you are a diseased, terminally ill wreck and if you want to enjoy a few more months of wretched existence you absolutely have to have the latest cure for dry mouth syndrome in your (for want of a better term) medicine cabinet.  You know, either that or drink a glass of water.

With their "taking vitamins used to be hard" pitch the advertisers have raised this to the next level.  You're not just sick, you're not just unhealthy you are fundamentally non viable as a life form.  It's a miracle that you've even managed to get this far without gummi breast milk (don't laugh, I'll bet its coming).  Furthermore you are incapable of helping yourself.  You couldn't even swallow without a vitamin company dedicating a massive research team to coming up with the idea of gummi vitamins.

The simple fact is taking vitamins was never hard after we figured out what vitamins were and decided we should eat a few.  It was that sort of creative and imaginative thinking that got us to our current level of civilisation.  Sadly the most brilliant minds of our current generation are devoted to persuading us to eat gummi vitamins.  It is these guys who will take us to our next level of civilisation.  Or, as I strongly suspect, our last level of civilisation.  The incipient collapse of our society should lead to maniacal anarchy of Mad Max proportions with violence, banditry and cannibalism.  Sadly unless somebody comes up with gummi humans before that happens even that level of activity and enthusiasm may be beyond us.