Drink soda, gain 10 pounds of fat a year!

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If you can’t win hearts and minds, appeal to their stomachs. That’s seems to be the philosophy of the New York City health department, which recently released nauseating videos of a man attempting to drink what looks like a gloopy, gelatinous cup of fat.

Viewers seem to have gotten the hint -- but they’re spitting it right back out. New Yorkers had had it up to here. They’d been putting up with subway ads sending the same message, as well as a failed proposal for a soda tax this year. ‘I want this on my Ipod,’ one commenter at New York Magazine said of the video.

Then again, said commenter Alexandre Laudet over at the Huffington Post, ‘We are so bombarded with info we almost need to be shocked into listening at times so if it works, why not?’

The American Beverage Assn. called the ads ‘sensationalized.’ That may be so -- and it may have inspired the contrarian consumer to crack open another can of soda -- but I’ll bet you a mineral water that anyone who’s seen the ad will think twice before taking that first sip.

-- Amina Khan