Obesity: Rhetorical Analysis

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This is an essay written in the MIT Sloan Management Review that presents the correlation between businesses and the issue of obesity in order to persuade businesses to take action in regards to preventing the issue. Therefore, its target audience is anyone who currently works in business or plans to do so in the future. In this review, the author begins by citing four internal and external reasons for which businesses should care about obesity: self-preservation, public criticism, employee productivity, and opportunity. The author proceeds by providing an idea as to how businesses can assist in reversing the trend. In order to do so, he analyzes what he considers to be the two sides of the obesity problem: physical activity and food consumption. …show more content…

I believe that the essay could have expanded on the examples with some history on each companies’ initiatives and quantitative date resulting from those initiatives. For instance, when the author states “General Mills Inc.’s Yoplait Healthy Heart Yogurt; and Kellogg Co.’s Tiger Power low-sugar, whole-grain cereal all fell far short of company expectations despite major expenditures on their launches.” (Seiders, 2007), I wish there was more information of what exactly those initiatives consisted of and more detailed reasons as to why they did not work as intended. Nonetheless, I understand that doing so might have compromised the accessibility of the review since it could potentially increase the complexity of the essay’s language. As a result, the text has encouraged me to research more about each specific example and provided me with more direction as to what I can use to support my thesis. It has served as a general database in which I can now research and expand and I hope to able to communicate a larger sum of information regarding the topic, while maintaining the clarity that can be exemplified by this review. I will compile a list of the examples mentioned throughout the text and immerse and each one of them in order to extract key information such as the reasoning behind the initiative, why it failed, and what it says about the impact of people’s food choices on

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