The "ideal" pills

A “drug” that is commonly used today are dietary supplements. One dietary supplement whose website I visited was the HUM (https://www.humnutrition.com/), which offers different kind of products that ranges from skin care to dietary supplements. The specific name of their dietary supplement is the “Skinny Bird” and just from the name itself we can infer that it is related to some kind of a diet pill. The packaging of the pill is a black bottle with pink label wrapped around the bottle. In the label, the ingredients are listed: chromium, caralluma fimbriate extract, 5-HTP, green tea extract, rice flour, cellulose, and ascorbyl palmitate. In addition, the dietary supplement is vegetarian/vegan. In addition, the HUM website is very colorful and feminine and most of the people that gave reviews were women. Another small, detail that I noticed is that they had Sephora (a makeup brand) listed as a placed to buy their product.

We all know that dietary pills are advertised especially towards women. We can see that from the branding, the color of the packaging, the way they advertise the supplements, and majority of people who buys dietary pills are women. Even if you google dietary supplements, the first thing that comes up are supplements catered to women. The society created a narrative for women in response to the “beauty” and fashion in today’s trend. These pills are basically encouraging and pushing women to have the “perfect” look and body style. In addition, these pills contain substances, such as 5-HTP, that are not good for people’s health. 5-HTP, which extracted from the seed of the Griffonia simplicifolia plant, is usually sold as an herbal supplement but not as a medication. 5-HTP increases the serotonin level of a person which can be harmful for their physical and mostly mental health, if used extensively.

I am not against with the use of dietary product but the fact that the society is creating a generalized view of what the ideal women’s body should look like and encouraging them to take these kind of pills is something that I am against. Furthermore, there are some men’s and other’s dietary pills but they are barely advertised compared to the ones catered for women.