TV Ads Contribute to Childhood Obesity, Economists Say
Seattle – According to a new study, television advertisements affect childhood obesity. Thus, many people are calling for fast food advertisements to be banned from being run during children’s television programs.
Experts and parents alike hope that this will help reduce the number of obese and overweight children currently in the United States by as much as 18 percent. Additionally, many believe that the number of obese or overweight teens will decline by as much as 14 percent.
The study, which ran in the November issue of The Journal of Law and Economics, focuses on researchers who used statistical models to show the links between obesity rates and the time spent viewing fast food advertising.
The study found that the more fast food advertisements that were run, the more at risk children were of obesity, especially if the advertisements were run during children-focused television programs.
Researches balk at claims that the study is flawed because overweight kids spend more time in front of the television.
In fact, Michael Grossman, professor of economics at City University of New York said, “There is not a lot of evidence that overweight kids are more likely to watch TV than other kids. We’re arguing the causality is how many messages are aired — seeing more of these messages is leading people to put on weight.”
Shin-Yi Chou, an economist at Lehigh College, and Inas Rashad, an economist at Georgia State University, served as the study’s co-authors.
However, some critics have pointed out that a lot of the data used in the study is old and comes from the late 1990s. Since then, a number of fast food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King have signed the Council of Better Businesses Bureaus’s Children’s Food and Beverage
Advertising Initiative, which promises to advertise healthier products to children below the age of 12.
“I can’t help think that two huge chains advertising apples and milk to kids is going to be affecting children’s preferences,” said Elaine Kolish, a spokesman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus.
Though people are calling for the banning of fast food advertisements, but only three countries, to date, have taken this step: Sweden, Norway, and Finland. These countries have banned commercial sponsorship of children’s programs, and many experts believe this will be hard to do in the United States because commercial sponsorship is a major part of how television networks conduct business.
Instead of banning such advertisements from airing during children focused programming, some people are suggesting that a different route be taken. For example, some researchers have suggested eliminating federal tax deductions that businesses use when it comes to advertisement. This, researchers suggest, would cut down on the number of advertisements and would in turn cut down childhood obesity by as much as 7 percent.
The study is being published this month in the Journal of Law & Economics.
WOW, you mean sitting in front of the tv for hours a day is not the only cause of childhood obesity? That watching tv commercials encourage the kids to ask mom and dad to take them to McDonalds for Cheeseburgers and Chicken Nugges and the parents are so spellbound from the commericial that they take them to eat this type of food?
COME ON. All children need a healthy balance of fruits, veggies, and even fats. When my youngest appeared to be a little overweight I was concerned and took him a specialist, I was told that every child’s diet needs fats, it helps brain cells to grow.
The real problem is we as parents have become lazy and instead of cooking the veggies and serving the fruits, we are taking them to McDonalds and Burer King and not encourageing them to make good choices for foods!
Just because you are at Burger King, McDonalds or Wendy’s doesn’t mean you have to get a burger. Come on all these chains offer salads and broiled chicken.
We as parents need to start telling our children that they will eat what is needed for their diet and that will include friuts, veggies and sometimes a treat at one of those fast food chains.
The problem starts with the parents and then we pass it to our children.