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| Can you believe sugar-free cookies are often loaded with hydrogenated oils (trans fats that are really unhealthy)? The first ingredient listed on many sugar free cookies is vegetable shortening, which is a trans fat. |
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Pretty much everyone knows that television creates couch potatoes, but now a new study shows that television also adversely affects kids’ food choices. The study, which was conducted by a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, was published in the December 2003 issue of Pediatrics, and showed conclusively that TV watching led to a lower intake of fruits and vegetables among 548 ethnically diverse 12 and 13 year olds. The more TV viewing time increased, the more the consumption of fruits and vegetables decreased.
 One hypothesis is that kids replace the fruits and vegetables they should be eating with foods they see advertised on TV. The advertising of fruits and vegetables is pretty much non-existent on kids’ shows, while ads for less healthy choices are prevalent. In fact, children from two to eleven years old are exposed to an average of 150 to 200 hours of commercial messages or 20,000 commercials a year, and studies have shown that more than half of those commercials are for food.
What’s more, many of these commercials for kids contain messages that are misleading about the nutritional value of the foods advertised. For example, one study showed that 90 percent of cereal ads claim that the product was part of a “balanced” or “complete” breakfast. Many of the kids I talk to think yogurt is a “health food,” and while yogurt does contain some healthy ingredients, fruit-flavored varieties favored by kids contain as much sugar, ounce per ounce, as gourmet ice creams.
It’s also possible that TV watching simply lends itself to easy-to eat, prepared snack foods, many of which contain lots of sugar and/or trans fats. If kids fill up on junk food, they’ll be even less inclined to eat fruits and vegetables.
What to do? Awareness of these findings can go a long way towards helping your children—most parents probably didn’t even know the extent to which TV could be influencing their kids’ nutritional needs. The obvious next step is for parents to help their kids make informed decisions and encourage them to knock off the junk food so they can eat more fruits and vegetables.
If limiting TV is not an always an option, parents can help kids become more media literate, too, by watching food commercials together and providing input that the food advertised might be sending misleading messages. Pull out a box of sugary cereal that your child begged you to buy, and point out the grams of sugar; compare it to a better choice. Or, let them look at the labels on fruit-flavored yogurt and ice cream. Teach them awareness, make it a fun game you play together and they can start on a road towards lifelong healthy eating habits.
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