Santa is a public health hazard - promoting obesity and drink-driving, experts have claimed.
Dr Nathan Grills and illustrator Brendan Halyday, from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said the current image of Santa promotes obesity, drink-driving, speeding and a general unhealthy lifestyle.
Santa's universal fame means he is used by companies around the globe to sell all kinds of products, including unhealthy foods, they went on. For example, there is very high awareness of Santa among young children - higher than the McDonald's fictional character, Ronald McDonald. Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the authors said Santa used to also sell cigarettes but that has now been banned.
They went on to provide a full list of Santa's unhealthy behaviours, including encouraging fathers to step in and eat leftover mince pies, thereby expanding their own waistlines. With billions of homes to visit, Santa is also soon over the drink-driving limit due to too many brandies and sherries.
The authors conclude there is a need for Santa to undergo an image overhaul - one that promotes healthy living.
"We need to be aware that Santa has an ability to influence people, and especially children, towards unhealthy behaviour," they said. "Given Santa's universal appeal, and reasoning from a population health perspective, Santa needs to affect health by only 0.1% to damage millions of lives. We propose a new image for Santa to ensure that his influence on public health is a positive one."
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6 comments:
What a load of tosh! What next dwarves should be banned to short? jesus should have a shave? witches upset people with warts? for christ sake leave us alone!
Is it April Fools already?
Why is everyone so sensitive?
If it's so ridiculous why can't you just smile knowingly and ignore it?
What offends me about jolly old Santa is that he's a creation of Coke.
Wrong - the image we know today was invested by Thomas Nast, a 19th century American cartoonist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
OK, sorry.
He's a re-imaginationing!, popularisation and commercialisation of Coke.
Is that OK?
Influence of Germanic paganism and folklore
Numerous parallels have been drawn between Santa Claus and the figure of Odin, a major god amongst the Germanic peoples prior to their Christianization. Since many of these elements are unrelated to Christianity, there are theories regarding the pagan origins of various customs of the holiday stemming from areas where the Germanic peoples were Christianized and retained elements of their indigenous traditions, surviving in various forms into modern depictions of Santa Claus.
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