Banning TV Ads May Reduce Childhood Obesity
Prohibiting fast-food ads on television in the United States might decrease the amount of obese children by 18 percent, researchers announced on Wednesday.
"We have known for some time that childhood obesity has gripped our culture, but little empirical research has been done that identifies television advertising as a possible cause," said economist Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
"Hopefully, this line of research can lead to a serious discussion about the type of policies that can curb America’s obesity epidemic."
However, the team at the National Bureau of Economic Research queries whether or not it would be sensible to enforce that kind of government directive, as this something only Sweden, Norway and Finland have actually done.
For their investigation, financed partly by the federal government, Chou and colleagues looked at statistics on 13,000 children from the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, both released by the U.S. Department of Labor.
"The advertising measure used is the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week," they noted in the Journal of Law and Economics.
"Our results indicate that a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guesses that 13.9 percent of children aged 2 to 5 are obese, 18.8 percent of those at 6 to 11 years are and in excess of 17 percent of those 12 to 19.
The amounts have been progressively getting higher.
Television watching is also acknowledged to elevate obesity rates, because children exercise a lesser amount of time and because it can impede their sleeping habits.
The Institute of Medicine accounted in 2006 that there was persuasive verification connecting food advertising on television and amplified childhood corpulence.
One study implied that children saw about 20,000 commercials aired annually in the late 1970s, increasing to 30,000 per year in the late 1980s and even more than 40,000 annually in the late 1990s.
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