Childhood Obesity: Is total TV watching time the problem, or is it the commercials?

By , SparkPeople Blogger
It’s been documented for quite a while that there’s a strong link between TV watching and obesity in children. The assumption has usually been that the time a child spends watching TV reduces the time spent on physical activity, but this new research indicates things may not be this simple.

When researchers from UCLA recently studied the TV and video viewing activities of 2000 children, they found that there was no association at all between viewing time and obesity for those children who watched videos or other commercial-free programs. But that picture changed when children were watching programs that included commercials. Researchers found that the more commercials the child was exposed to, the more likely it was that the child would be obese. This was especially true for children under 7.

This study wasn’t able to document how much of the advertising watched by the children was specifically food advertising, or exactly how food commercials influenced eating habits or weight. Obviously, younger children don’t usually do their own grocery shopping or meal planning—but they can make grocery shopping and healthy family meals pretty contentious and difficult when they’ve got their minds set on the products they see on TV, especially after they get a taste of them. Sometimes it can feel like the only way to get them to eat anything at all is to let them have the fast food or sugary food they want.

Recognizing the power of advertising to influence the health, eating habits and weight of young children, the national Better Business Bureau recently established a program aimed at getting major food producers to adopt appropriate guidelines for advertising their products to children. The program urges companies to establish voluntary nutritional standards for products that can be advertised directly to children under 12, and monitors how well companies implement and abide by these standards. You can check out these guidelines and performance results at the BBB’s website.

What do you think about this? Do you believe that food commercials play an important role in childhood obesity? If you have young kids, do you restrict their commercial-viewing time?