Would Banning Fast-Food Advertising Reduce Childhood Obesity?

What do You Think?

 Researchers say that banning fast food advertising still wouldn't work.

 

 

 Why Bans Don't Work

Ad bans have failed everywhere they've been tried. The list so far includes Sweden, Quebec, and Norway. None of these places have shown significant reductions in child obesity. In Sweden, the restrictions have been in place for a decade, yet the country's childhood obesity rates are in line with the rest of Europe.
There's no correlation between ad exposure and childhood obesity. George Mason University's Todd Zywicki noted at a forum last summer that the average American child actually watches less TV than he did 15 years ago. What's more, children face less exposure to food ads now than they did then, for a variety of reasons. The remote control has made ad-watching optional over the last 20 years, and more recent technology like TiVo may make traditional commercials completely obsolete.
Broadcast television is also losing younger viewers to cable, where ads in general are 40 percent less prevalent and where food ads comprise about half the percentage of overall ad time that they do in broadcast. Cable also offers more options for channel-flipping during commercials, and premium cable stations like HBO, which have no commercials at all, have become popular. All told, the average American child viewed 900 fewer food commercials in 2003 than he did in 1994. That this same average child gained weight amounts to a pretty solid rebuttal to the theory that food marketing is a significant contributor to childhood obesity.





 Source:
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