Abstract
In this exploration and analysis, I researched the impact of advertisements on children and examined why the obesity rates of children are higher than ever. I discussed my hypothesis that advertisements do influence the choices children make in regard to their eating habits. I illustrated how these articles set up their research methods, which usually resulted in various categorizing. I also acknowledged any biases or flaws in the study. In the end, fast food advertisements were shown most frequently during children’s programs. These advertisements never meet the recommended daily values for nutrition in any category.

Advertisements and Children: Do Advertisements Affect Children’s Weight? I decided to write about how television ads affect children’s weight. Obesity is a vital health issue in today’s society because the fact that obesity is so high. Especially in preschools with “obesity rates for preschool children tripling in past 30 years and quadrupling for children aged 6 to 11 years” (Zimmerman, F. J., & Bell, J. F. 2010).
Hypothesis and Introduction Before even beginning any research my first impression was that yes, the ads that restaurants put on television do have an affect on children. Specifically, children who watch television for long periods of time (multiple hours in one session) or who watch television routinely. Because the children see the fast food industries advertisements more then they see the healthy options. In fact, I rarely see a healthy food advertisement on television.
Testing
In order to prove my hypothesis, I found my first article and it used television viewing hours and body mass index (your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters then squared) to test if watching DVDs and television leads to obesity in children from the age of zero to twelve(Zimmerman et al., 2010). This article used questionnaires and time use diaries, filled out by the parents, to measure how long 2,037 children spent watching television and to measure the children’s BMI (Zimmerman et al., 2010). The researchers eventually split the television shows viewed into two different categories (Zimmerman et al., 2010). These two categories were television with commercial content and television without commercial content (Zimmerman et al., 2010). So that they could determine if the program or the commercials caused any increase in weight.
Causes
This article decided to explore the three different ways that television viewing can lead to obesity(Zimmerman et al., 2010). One way television could result in obesity is by spending time inside instead of outside exercising (Zimmerman et al., 2010). Another reason this article believes that children who watch television are more likely to be obese is by advocating eating while watching television, which can lead to children consuming more lower quality food (Zimmerman et al., 2010). One example of a generally lower quality food is McDonalds, the purpose of these fast food restaurants is to produce food that is quick, which usually results in a lower quality product. Viewing television may also lead to obesity by exposing children to ads; sometimes at a very young age (Zimmerman et al., 2010). According to Zimmerman et al, “Almost 90% of children begin watching television regularly before age 2, and the average age of initiation is 9 months”. Also, “the typical 1st grader can already recognize and respond to more than 200 brands” (Zimmerman et al., 2010). “Children younger than 5 years see an average of more than 4000 television commercials for food each year, or about 30 hours’ worth” (Zimmerman et al., 2010). These statistics make it clear that advertisers are reaching children at young ages. This also raises a red flag for me, why are the parents of these children allowing them to regularly watch television instead of promoting physical activity? Another factor that Zimmerman et al. acknowledged but didn’t really research was that watching TV reduces sleep, and lack of sleep is another factor that can lead to obesity (Zimmerman et al., 2010). However, this article did not clarify how lack of sleep can lead to obesity, so I researched and found that the hormones Leptin and Ghrelin (which influence your appetite) are affected when you sleep (Bouchez, 2007). So, a lack of sleep would also affect these two hormones (Bouchez, 2007). Research has shown that a lack of activity in Leptin and Ghrelin will likely increase weight (Bouchez, 2007). In addition to this, a lack of sleep can also lead some individuals to a “late night snack”, which can be unhealthy and also result in obesity. There was various reasons why lack of sleep can influence someone’s weight.
Results
In the end, this article found that commercial viewing instead of television viewing was associated with BMI based on the results the parent filled out on the questionnaire(Zimmerman et al., 2010). Also the article found that the displacement of physical activity because of watching television was not a factor that influenced the BMI (Zimmerman et al., 2010). Mainly it was the ads that glorified fatty foods during the commercials of the program that influenced the children’s weight (Zimmerman et al., 2010). One way this could have happened, is that the children were remembering the product recognitions and choosing the brands or restaurants they seen on television during their daily life. Lets say that you just seen an advertisement for McDonalds, then your mother asks you where you want to eat while you are driving on your way home from school. You look outside the car and see the golden arches of McDonalds and instantly remember how they are giving away a Mator action figure in the happy meals. So without even thinking about the nutritional value of a happy meal, you chose to eat at McDonalds because, you remembered their product recognition with the golden arches and the commercial about the Mator action figure. So in conclusion, for the first article the claim that viewing television has an affect on a child’s BMI was founded to be unsupported because it was not the television viewing that lead to a change in weight, it was more the commercial viewing (Zimmerman et al., 2010).
Advice
In order to avoid this increase in children’s weight, families could either buy their children DVD’s because they do not contain commercials, they could watch shows on television that are presented with limited commercial interruption, or they could simply talk to their children about the motives of these ads.
Causes
Another fact that this article used that could be the cause of the increase in children’s obesity, is the idea that “young children are unable to distinguish television advertisements from the program that surrounds it” (Zimmerman et al., 2010). To me, this could mean that young children could also associate the restaurants they see on television to the characters they are watching in their favorite television programs. If this is what is happening, then it could be an even bigger problem because these characters like Mator, from the hit movie Cars could subliminally remind these children every time they see him at the restaurant McDonalds that sponsors the movie Cars during every commercial. Characters like Mator are seen in so many places like at Wal-Mart while grocery shopping, on television, at school on other children’s lunch boxes, and so many other locations. Basically, because these characters can be seen by children at numerous types of places during any given day, the children are constantly being subliminally reminded of fast food restaurants like McDonalds. This factor by itself could be the reason why obesity rates for children are so high.
Biases
Even though the article came up with this conclusion, there were some biases that could have caused this result. The parent questionnaire may not be accurate considering that it was a self report and parents may not be truthful about the amount of time they allow their children to watch television, for fear of being judged. The parents also may have not been completely accurate about their children’s weight because that may have looked bad on them for not monitoring what their children eat. They also only filled out the time diary for one day and that one day was randomly picked, so for some children it was a holiday, weekday, or weekend (Zimmerman et al., 2010). Even though this one day was random, it still was only one day and can not provide a good representation of generally how long children watch television. In addition to this, the study was completed in 1997 and 2002 and the educational cable and entertainment shows did not contain commercials according to this article in these time periods (Zimmerman et al., 2010). However, in today’s society almost all television programs have commercials or at least are limited interruption programs with few commercials. This article did take out some of the gender and age biases by converting the BMI into a z score (Zimmerman et al., 2010). In my view, they did forget some vital biases that if taken out could have improved the overall creditability of the study.
Hypothesis and Introduction Although my second article has substantially less biases, this article studied the nutritional content of commercials during children’s programs (Harrison & Marske 2005). For this article I hypothesized that the majority of the content would be for fatty fast food restaurants. You may be wondering why nutritional content is important. Well “about 1 in 7 White children and 1 in 4 African American and Latino children in the United States are currently overweight or obese” (Harrison & Marske 2005). Obesity and being overweight is clearly an issue and television content has been linked to this as early as 1985 (Harrison & Marske 2005). A lack of healthy advertised food on television could be the reason for this.
Testing
In order to study the nutritional content, my article taped 40 hours of television programs that were rated as the “most popular” for children during spring 2003 over five weeks (Harrison & Marske 2005). The researchers decided to separate the content of these commercials by type, occasion, and character (Harrison & Marske 2005). In this case, type would be general or child audience (Harrison & Marske 2005). Occasion would refer to breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack (Harrison & Marske 2005). Finally character could mean the live action character Superman (Harrison & Marske 2005). In order to study the nutritional content the food presented in the ads must be separated into multiple categories like breads/cereal, fruit/vegetable, dairy, meat/poultry/fish, candy/sweets/soft drinks, alcohol, convenience foods/fast food, low fat, fiber or bran, vitamin or mineral, partially of completely nonartifical, low in sodium, natural, and low in calories (Harrison & Marske 2005). The sample resulted in 1,424 ads, 1,194 characters and 725 foods (Harrison & Marske 2005). The researchers that wrote this article also chose to see if there was a connection between the characters in the ads (Harrison & Marske 2005). In order to study this they categorized the characters by body size, gender, race, and whether or not they were shown eating (Harrison & Marske 2005). The apparent body size of these characters ranged from very underweight to very overweight (Harrison & Marske 2005). The results showed that 36% of the male characters were depicted eating and 24% of the females also ate during their advertisements (Harrison & Marske 2005). These results could mean that eating was a masculine thing to do and be the reason why males think they should eat larger quantities then females (Harrison & Marske 2005). Also overweight males appeared more frequently then underweight males (Harrison & Marske 2005). Unlike females who were viewed more often as being underweight then overweight (Harrison & Marske 2005). Either way this just reinforces the idea that its okay for males to be larger then females and that is stereotyping based on gender.
Results
Overall “convenience/fast foods and sweets comprised 83% of advertised foods” (Harrison & Marske 2005). The majority of the advertisements showed snack time over breakfast, lunch, and dinner (Harrison & Marske 2005). Even these low quality ads often tried to say that their product was “healthy” by claiming that it used some natural ingredients to be beneficial (Harrison & Marske 2005). According to the recommended daily value (RDV) of 2,000 calories a day the food in these commercials would surpass the amount of sodium and exceed the amount of recommended sugar by 171g (Harrison & Marske 2005). Again if using the RDV, these children would not get enough fiber, vitamin A, calcium, or iron (Harrison & Marske 2005). The average serving size of food in these ads would be 140 g and consist of 229 calories (Harrison & Marske 2005). There was little ads involving fruit, vegetables, dairy, meat, poultry or fish (Harrison & Marske 2005). Even though these items are essential for growing children. Overall the nutritional content of advertised food does not meet the recommended daily values of food groups (Harrison & Marske 2005). There was no correlation between the characters and the nutrition label in the ads (Harrison & Marske 2005). Even though there was some problems with these articles I believe there is more than enough evidence and statistics that the obesity rates in children are a issue that needs to be resolved. It is also clear to me that there is a strong correlation between the unhealthy commercial content on television today and these obesity rates. The nutritional content on television is simply unacceptable and there are multiple things that we as a society could do to fix this rising issue. These articles recommend three ways to fight weight gains in children. One we could talk to our children about the goal of these advertisements, two we could limit commercial viewing by watching DVD’s or programs with limited interruptions, three we could promote physical activity and healthy diets.