Strong4Life’s “Tough Love” Childhood Obesity Campaign Creates Controversy

In an effort to turn September's Childhood Obesity Awareness Month into Stop Childhood Obesity Month, a new, in-your-face billboard, television and radio ad campaign, called Strong4Life, hopes to wake people up to the skyrocketing rate of childhood obesity in Georgia. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, designer of the campaign, calls the approach “tough love,” but with slogans such as “Fat kids become fat adults,” some are left wondering if the ads will hurt the very kids the campaign is trying to help. The stark, black-and-white multimedia campaign includes television ads featuring overweight children talking about being picked on at school or how they are scared because they were diagnosed with hypertension. At their conclusion the ads say, “Stop sugarcoating it Georgia.” Billboards popping up all around metro-Atlanta show some of the same kids with messages like, “Warning: Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.”

According to a 2009 report by Trust in America’s Health, more than 20 percent of Georgia’s children are overweight, the second-worst percentage in the country, only barely trailing behind Mississippi. In the South, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi all have child obesity rates of more than 20 percent.