Colonel Chicken Cares about Your Breasts but Not Your Life

Does the American Cancer Society care about heart disease? Does the Heart Association care about diabetes? Does Crohns and Colitis care about strokes? Does Liver care about Lung? Does anyone care about all of you?

Our health care, health research and health education have become so fragmented because of marketing—and money—that it seems as if no one cares if we live or die they just want the organs they represent to survive. You can go ahead and die, they seem to say, as long as you don’t die of OUR disease.

A current ad campaign by Kentucky Fried Chicken is promoting an appeal for fried chicken and The Susan B. Komen Foundation. You can buy a big pink bucket (a bucket!) of fried chicken for the woman in your life and 50 cents from each big pink bucket of FRIED chicken will go to breast cancer research.

This makes me crazy! Does anyone want breast cancer? Nope. Do we want to prevent deaths from breast cancer? Yep. But this fried chicken breast campaign begs me to ask The Colonel—and Susan B. Komen: Do you really care about women’s lives or only about breasts?

Here’s some women’s health research: More women—more by far—die of heart disease than breast cancer. More women die of cardiac related disease than breast or any other cancer. So if you really want to promote women’s health should you be encouraging us to eat buckets of FRIED chicken? (We know that you think we are babies—all that pink crap--but you must also think we’re stupid and can’t Google: breast cancer versus heart disease.)

What’s next? How about some pink Marlboro smokes? Pink Absolut vodka shots? A gallon of pink Hagen Das Ice cream and pink Wise potato chips consumed on a big pink couch in front of a pink TV?

Come on Susan B. Komen, get some balls—or are you leaving that to The Lance Armstrong Foundation? Will one of these health charities have the courage and integrity to care about the whole woman? Wouldn’t you love to see a marketing message that says: A woman has boobs and brains and lungs and a heart and we need to take care of all of it for good health and a good life.