by Jennifer Buckett

Created on: April 13, 2010

An overweight adolescent has an eighty percent chance of being obese as an adult (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004). Considering that thirty percent of American children are currently overweight, America’s future is looking heavy (Batada & Wootan, 2007). Research has shown that food advertisements seen in the media affect “children’s food choices, preferences, their diets, and their health” (Batada & Wootan, 2007) and the nutrition habits that are established in childhood often carry into adulthood (Veracity, 2006). Nowadays, children spend more time watching television than participating in any other activity, besides sleeping, viewing an average of twenty two hours of television a week (Boynton-Jarrett, 2003) In that time, kids are exposed to up to three hours of food advertisements (Kotz & Story, 1994), totaling nearly forty thousand advertisements a year (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004). The American government has an ethical responsibility to shield children from unhealthy food advertisements in order to prevent them from establishing poor nutrition patterns and gaining excess weight. In hopes of reshaping children’s ideology surrounding nutrition, regulations should be installed to limit the types and lengths of advertisements that are allowed to be shown during children’s television programming. Ideally, these restrictions would allow children the chance to form healthy diet patterns early in life, resulting in a lifelong healthy weight. Furthermore, public health campaigns promoting an active lifestyle and healthy diet, like the VERB campaign, should receive heavy airplay during children’s programming to provide children with the resources to make healthier choices.

Childhood obesity is due to a multitude of factors, but food advertisements have a demonstrated effect on children’s food choices and preferences, their diets, and their overall health (Batada & Wootan, 2007). Each year, young children, age two to eleven, are exposed to about forty thousand commercials, fifty-six percent of which are for food (Boynton-Jarrett, 2003). A study performed by Margaret Gamble in 1999 analyzed sixteen hours of Saturday morning children’s programming and found that, alarmingly, ninety-one percent of food ads were for products low in nutritional value and high in sugar, fat, and salt. High-sugar cereals were the most frequently advertised, comprising thirty-five percent of total

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