Childhood obesity: Is advertising to blame?

Children are exposed to $13 billion of food advertising every year, according to a professor of food and resource economics at the University of Florida.

Yet only one food product advertised during 743 commercials would be recommended food according to the USDA's new food pyramid, said Lisa House, who holds a doctorate in food and resource economics. The one food was Rice Krispies, the healthy kid cereal that talks back.

House had hopes of running an experiment to document the number of healthy versus unhealthy foods on children's television, such as Saturday morning cartoons. However, she could not run this experiment with her students because there was only one healthy food on all of childen's tv, she said. Most of the foods advertised to children are high in sugar and/or fat and offer little nutritional value.

In addition to promoting food that's unhealthy, no advertisements for fruits and vegetables have been aired on Saturday mornings in 25 years, House said.

Does advertising make that big of a difference in what children eat?

In my personal experience, I would say yes.

I have three nieces. The oldest one, Taylor, is almost 4 years old, and she loves the Disney princesses more than anything else and hates fruit. Her mom is extremely worried about letting her children follow the trend of childhood obesity so she restricts what they eat fairly strictly, but she has had the worst time getting Taylor to eat fruits. Recently, she found grapes packaged with Disney characters at the grocery store. Taylor ate them up. If the Disney princesses were eating grapes then she wanted to eat grapes and thus my sister-in-law was able to get her to consume fruit.

According to House, Taylor is not the only child influenced by advertising. Children who watch more tv have less nutritional knowledge and request more unhealthy foods than children who watch less tv. Taylor watches a fair amount of tv, especially anything on the Disney Channel, and her favorite place to eat in life is Sonny's barbecue restaurant. It could have been a catchy commercial that made her love this place so much because it's not someplace her parents would go often. It's not that close to her house that the aromas of barbecue sauce and baked beans could draw her in. Yet anytime you ask this child where she wants to eat it's the same answer, Sonny's. And for a while she wouldn't eat chicken at all unless it was from Sonny's. A lot of time we would just say the chicken was from Sonny's and she would then be hungry for it and eat it.

Proponents of these food advertisements might say that children who are watching tv are less active and that's why they're obese and that's a whole different problem than advertisements and that's a valid point. But I can't help but wonder how large the role of advertisements play in a child's desires.