Media Influence on the Eating Habits of Children and Adolescents

927 Words2 Pages

Incidentally, losing weight to fit media’s portrayal of the ideal body is not the only problem that media has brought about. As most people know, obesity is an increasing problem. Unlike eating disorders, obesity is not something that one can be treated for like a disease. It is simply an increase in the body’s weight that is above a normal, healthy body weight. Even though obesity itself is not a disease it can lead to the contraction of diseases and other problems, like high blood pressure. Not only adults are becoming obese, but children as well. In the past 30 years the number of obese and overweight children has risen to 16%, which is a 300% increase. Brownback writes, “The U.S. Surgeon General has identified being overweight and obese as one of the fastest growing causes of disease and death in America” (219). It is truly amazing that obesity’s mortality rate has exceeded that of cigarettes.
This increase in obesity in children is due to the influence of media on children’s lives. The media nowadays specifically targets young children as a way to ensure their loyalty to a product and company as they grow up. Food advertisements influence children to make unhealthy food choices. Candy commercials are a good example of these advertisements. In the commercials they show a bunch of children eating the candy and having a good time to make the candy seem like a good thing. This causes the child to become interested and continue to buying and eating the product. It was found over 30 years of experimenting that “[c]hildren exposed to advertising choose the advertised food products at significantly higher rates than do those not exposed” (Boyce 202). TV shows, video games, and other forms of media all promote the co...

... middle of paper ...

...219-221.JSTOR. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
Crisp, Arthur H. “A Tale of Corruption,” The British Journal of Psychiatry 180 (2002): 480-
482. BJPsych. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.
Harrison, Kristen and Hefner, Veronica. “Media Exposure, Current and Future Body Ideals, and Disordered Eating Among Preadolescent Girls: A Longitudinal Panel Study,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 35 (2006): 153-163. KristenHarrison. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
McNicholas, Fiona, et al. “Eating Concerns and Media Influences in an Irish Adolescent
Context,” European Eating Disorders Review 17 (2009): 208-213. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.
“The Role of Media in Childhood Obesity,” kff.org. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation,
Feb. 2004. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
Walsh, B. Timothy and Michael J. Devlin. “Eating Disorders: Progress and Problems,” Science
280 (1998): 1387-1390. JSTOR. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.

Open Document