TV advertisements Contribute to Childhood Obesity

Economists have estimated in a new study that banning fast food advertisements from children’s television programs would reduce the number of overweight children in the U.S. by 18 percent and decrease the number of overweight teens by 14 percent.

The researchers used several statistical models to link obesity rates to the amount of time spent viewing fast food advertising, finding that viewing more fast food commercials on television raises the risk of obesity in children. The study appears in this month’s issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.

“There is not a lot of evidence that overweight kids are more likely to watch TV than other kids,” said Michael Grossman, professor of economics at the City University of New York. “We’re arguing the causality is how many messages are aired — seeing more of these messages is leading people to put on weight.” The study’s co-authors are Shin-Yi Chou, an economist at Lehigh College, and Inas Rashad, an economist at Georgia State University.

But the researchers’ estimate relies on older data gathered in the late 1990s, according to Elaine Kolish, a spokesman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus. Since then, two of the largest fast food chains — Burger King and McDonald’s — and more than a dozen other packaged food companies have signed on to the council’s Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, she said, pledging to advertise only their healthier products to children under age 12. Read more

Junk food advertising targets kids, study says

Children eight to 12 years old are exposed to an average of 21 television food advertisements each day, commercials that predominantly push candy, snacks and other unhealthy foods contributing to childhood obesity. Fully half the ads on children’s programs involve the sale of food items.

And they’re not pushing healthy foods. “The vast majority of the foods that kids see advertised on television today are for products that nutritionists would tell us they need to be eating less of, not more of,” said Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which reported the research Wednesday as part of what Kaiser billed as the first comprehensive study of food advertising and children. Read more

Coalition works to reduce obesity in children

Birthday celebrations at Concord Child Care Center used to mean frosted cakes and candy-filled piñatas.

Today, preschoolers celebrate with fruit salads and homemade pizzas instead.

Even small steps add up in the fight against pediatric obesity, which health officials say has reached epidemic proportions in the East Bay and across the nation.

Nationally, the percentage of toddlers and preschoolers who are overweight has more than doubled in the past 25 years.

Among schoolchildren, it has tripled.

Last year, 48 percent of children seen by Contra Costa County’s health system were overweight, including 34 percent of those ages 2 to 5. Read more