| Summary: | The Internet has provided a window for the pharmaceutical industry into people’s domestic spaces and facilitated the advertisement and purchase of pharmaceutical goods (Fox et al., 2005d). Whilst direct to consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals, including weight loss pills, is not permitted in the UK, these marketing restrictions are bypassed by food supplement promotions (Ventola, 2011). Consequently, online sellers of potentially dangerous slimming pills are putting “desperate dieters’” health at risk by seducing them with the promise of “quick-fix” and discreetly procured weight loss solutions (U.K. Government, 2017). By examining the website data of four major purveyors of herbal weight-loss products, I explore the persuasive, discursive strategies that marketers employ to sell herbal weight loss pills as commercial products.
A critical, fine-grained social semiotic analysis of dietary supplement promotion websites is particularly timely since ‘speech and language no longer appear adequate in understanding representation and communication in contemporary global, fluid and networked society’ (Jewitt, 2009:114). Accordingly, using the framework of ‘multimodal critical discourse analysis’ (Machin, 2013), I examine the way in which dietary supplement websites verbally and visually encode medical and pharmaceutical discourses as a means of promoting a thin body ‘ideal’ and the consumption of slimming pills. Furthermore, I consider how medical and pharmaceutical discourses operate to responsibilise the weight loss consumer and thereby contribute to the transformation of the consumer as patient, all the while configuring the seller as “expert” advisor and provider of ostensibly clinically sanctioned and effective weight loss ‘remedies’.
As well as contributing to theoretical perspectives concerning medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, this study will be of practical interest to professionals and educators concerned with public health, arguing as it does, for the need of stricter regulations around the promotion and sales of slimming pills over the internet.
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