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Indian charity creates deathly chocolates to show bodily ravages of diabetes

A healthcare charity has rolled out its own brand of graphically-shaped chocolates in a bid to show the damage caused by the disease diabetes.

Taking a leaf from the book of Singapore cigarette packages, the charity HealthCare atHOME rolled out a range of chocolates shaped like the different body parts that are affected when a diabetes patient keeps a high-sugar diet.

Named Dolce Mal – which translates from Italian and French to ‘sweetly bad’ –, the chocolates come in shapes of inflated hearts, failing kidneys and deteriorating eyes.

The campaign, developed by McCann Healthcare Asia-Pacific, is aimed at tackling soaring rates of the disease in India after the country was dubbed the diabetes capital of the world.

“The prevalence of the disease estimated to rise from 69.2 million to 123.5 million by 2040”, said Vivek Srivastava, chief executive officer of Healthcare atHOME. “Yet, many patients control it poorly, remaining on diets high in sugar and being unaware that it puts them at risk of serious complications, such as blindness, amputations, kidney failure and heart disease.”

Dolce Mal was launched in the week of World Diabetes Day at the HT Palate Fest, a three-day food festival in New Delhi. The brand has been distributed to over 500 doctors, with roll-outs continuing until the end of the year across North and West India.

Although McCann said the appearance of the hand-crafted chocolates was designed to encourage people not to eat them, Alejandro Canciobello, creative director at McCann Health Singapore, said they still tasted sweet “in order to show the public the bitter truth of poorly managed diabetes”.

June Laffey, McCann’s executive creative director of Australia and South East Asia, added: “Using chocolates shaped into the body parts that can be lost to diabetes, we hoped to not only shock, but motivate diabetes sufferers to go into battle against this insidious disease.”

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