TV Advertising And Childhood Obesity

Over the past twenty-five years obesity rates in America have risen at an alarming rate. According to stateofobesity.org, obesity continues to be one of the biggest threats to the country’s health. Because of this many people have come up with particular strategies to help reduce these statistics in the future. Understanding and accepting the fact that obesity is rising and huge threat to our lives is important because it allows the greater community and future generations become aware of how obesity can affect people’s daily lives in the present and quite possibly in the future as well. Researchers like Harris et al. study the effects that television food advertising have on eating behavior and concluded that exposure to TV advertisements …show more content…
These children were specifically elementary-school-age and were socioeconomically and ethnically diverse. In the first study 55 children participated and in the second study 63 children participated, creating a total of 118 participants. The researchers decided to combine the results of both experiments to “increase the power of statistical analyses.” They found that children who watched the a cartoon advertisement ate 45% more goldfish crackers than children who saw a regular advertisement. They strongly believe that their results demonstrate a causal link between snack consumptions and contributes to the obesity epidemic. Although this may be true in some ways, I believe that their results could possibly be skewed by children whose socioeconomic backgrounds are on the lower end. This is because many of the issues that parents deal with financially can lead to the type of food they bring to their kids or even how much they are able to regulate their children at home. In an article from the University of Michigan Health System called “Low-income communities more likely to face childhood Obesity” the author conveys that low income children and adolescents are more likely to be obese than children whose families have a higher income. The authors emphasize that “obesity rates were higher among African-American and Hispanic kids.” Although this may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial because in the first study 95% of the children were white and 5% of the children were of other ethnicities and in the second study 61% were White and 39% were made up of other ethnicities--such as Black, Hispanic, and Asian. Due to this, It’d be fair to say that their results could have been affected by the race and economic background of other children. In their article, they don’t mention whether or not these variables play a