Fit nation offers conflicting values and ethical choice

Exercise facility

Carol Forsloff - An athletic club in Oregon with its fitness message offers a conflicting one with a snack area featuring sugary desserts just as other businesses weigh what the public wants vs what it needs.


The athletic club boasts the best in swimming and exercise equipment, along with a variety of classes to get people in shape and help them maintain a healthy lifestyle.  The snack bar has a few healthy choices for sandwiches and desserts, but the display shelf proudly boasts whip cream and chocolate cake, pies and rich offerings.  They are, as the snack bar attendant underlined, there for the young people who frequent the club.

The club faces the dilemma restaurants and other businesses face every day,  whether to give people what they want or what is good for them.  

Should a restaurant follow the science and the strong messages that declare one should avoid excess sugar and focus on healthy choices instead, even at a young age because of obesity problems?   Or should it put out front the message that one need go nowhere else before or after an exercise for that sweet respite because it is right there at the fitness club? 

This conflict in whether to cater to public wants instead of public good is a decision many businesses face.  The media is one where the issue is argued regularly.  Should newspapers cater to the public's interest in sensation and excitement or to its need to know and be properly informed on issues that give serious facts? 

But the issue itself is a choice made by businesses everywhere, whether that is a shoe store with an inventory of fashionable shoes with the good-for-you kind on a back shelf hidden away.  

Each business makes a separate decision but also one based upon what others in a particular industry do as well as what the pattern is in the larger culture. 

The mental and physical  health of America is said to be compromised by bad eating habits, shoes  that over time create poor posture and arthritic conditions and news that entertains more than educates, according to industry experts. 

Knowing the message of health or its lack, both physically and mentally, is served in disparate ways, lets us know that the business culture itself fosters a message collectively that maintains unhealthy conditions.  Could it therefore collectively offer a message of health and sound science instead?