Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the barrage of
information about food that they receive while watching
television, kids are getting the wrong message about
healthy eating. A study has found that the more
television kids watch, the more confused they are about
which foods are -- and which aren't -- going to help
them grow up strong and healthy.
Increased television viewing had, in fact, a
double-negative effect on the children in the study.
Regardless of their initial nutritional knowledge, the
more television they watched, the less able they also
were "to provide sound nutritional reasons for their
food choices," said the author of the study, Kristen
Harrison, a professor of speech communication at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Foods marketed as aiding weight-loss were particularly
problematical for the kids in the study. They equated
the words "diet" and "fat-free" with being nutritious.
"When they were presented with choices like Diet Coke
vs. orange juice and fat-free ice cream vs. cottage
cheese, they were more likely to pick the wrong answer –
the diet and fat-free foods – than when they were
presented with choices without these labels, for
example, spinach vs. lettuce."
"The labels 'diet' and 'fat-free' suggest that these
foods are good for them and make it harder for them to
pick the 'right' answer," Harrison said, noting that the
goal of the study was "to gauge children's understanding
of which food would help them grow, not make them
slimmer."
TV advertising intentionally blurs the lines between
diet and nutritional – in Harrison's words it "frames"
diet foods by "equating weight-loss benefits with
nutritional benefits." One TV ad for chocolate syrup,
for example, runs the tagline, "as always, fat free."
"Child television viewers are bombarded with health
claims in television advertising," Harrison said. "Given
the plentitude of advertisements on television touting
the health benefits of even the most nutritionally
bankrupt of foods, child viewers are likely to become
confused about which foods are in fact healthy."
Adults, Harrison said, should be able to understand the
difference between foods that are healthy because they
help one grow up, and foods that are healthy because
they prevent one from growing out, "but this is too much
to expect kids to understand."
Study findings appear in the journal Health
Communication. Harrison's research focuses on media
effects on children and adolescents and the impact of
media exposure on body image and eating disorders.
For the study, 134 children in the first through third
grades were asked to respond to a questionnaire that
measured their nutritional knowledge, nutritional
reasoning and television viewing, once at the onset of
the study and again six weeks later.
On average, the children reported that they watched 28
hours of television a week; there was no correlation
between gender and age and the amount of television
watched.
In the nutritional knowledge part of the study, children
were presented with six pairs of foods and asked to
choose which item in each pair was better for helping
them "grow up strong and healthy." One food in each pair
was predetermined to be more "nutritionally dense" than
the other, Harrison said. The pairs were carrot/celery,
rice cake/wheat bread, jelly/peanut butter,
spinach/lettuce, fat-free ice cream/cottage cheese, and
orange juice/Diet Coke.
The children displayed "moderate" nutritional knowledge,
Harrison said. Out of a perfect score of 6, they got a
median score of 3.7 the first time, and 3.92 the second.
To test their nutritional reasoning, Harrison asked the
children why they chose each food, and their answers
were scored as representing either nutritional reasoning
or non-nutritional reasoning.
Examples of nutritional reasoning were: "More juicy, has
vitamins (referring to celery)" or "It has cheese,
cheese is made from milk, and milk is good" (cottage
cheese).
Examples of non-nutritional reasoning: "It’s chewy"
(wheat bread) and "My brother hates it" (spinach).
The children also displayed moderate nutritional
reasoning. "But as the study shows, this number
decreases with heavier TV viewing, especially for the
choices involving fat-free and diet labels."
One interesting finding was that children's nutritional
reasoning was "largely independent of their nutritional
knowledge."
For example, a second-grade boy who chose jelly over
peanut butter explained that he chose jelly because "it
has fruit in it and just a little sugar because sugar is
bad."
"Although his answer was incorrect, his reasoning was
nutritional," Harrison said.
Conversely, a third-grade girl who chose cottage cheese
over fat-free ice cream said she did so because "it has
less calories."
"Although her answer was correct, her reasoning
reflected the food's potential for weight loss rather
than its utility for helping her grow up strong and
healthy."
The reasoning that a food does not contain fat or has
fewer calories may appear to be nutritional in nature,
Harrison said, "but a lack of fat and calories will not
in itself help a child grow up strong and healthy."
"We know that many American children are consuming too
much fat and too many calories, but replacing the
nutrient-dense foods in their diets with low-fat,
low-calorie items like rice cakes and diet soda does
them a disservice by depriving their bodies of the
whole-food nutrients needed for growth."
The "ideal compromise," Harrison said, would be a diet
of foods that are rich in vitamins, minerals and fiber,
with moderate levels of fat and calories. There is a
"crucial difference between foods that don't contain
'bad-for-you' ingredients and foods that do contain
'good-for-you' ingredients."
Harrison said that whenever she presents this work,
people invariably say that because childhood obesity is
out of control in the country, a diet of rice cakes,
lettuce, jelly and Diet coke wouldn’t necessarily be a
bad thing.
"But I maintain that it
would be a bad thing because these foods are
nutritionally vacuous. Vodka is fat-free and has zero
digestible carbs, so should we have kids drinking that
every morning?"
"They need nutrients to grow, and the 'right-answer'
foods in the study have more of those nutrients than the
'wrong-answer' foods."
In her report, Harrison cited previous studies that have
found that 97.5 percent of the food commercials
appearing on weekend morning TV network programming were
for unhealthy foods – defined as products containing
significant amounts of fat, sodium, cholesterol or
sugar; for weekend evening programming, 78.3 percent of
the commercials were for unhealthy foods.
Therefore, whether kids are watching children's
programming or adults', they are exposed to ads for
unhealthy foods.
"Thus, television in general seems to be a source of
nutritional misinformation, and children's exposure to
television in general may increase their risk of
becoming misinformed food consumers," Harrison wrote.
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References:
worldhealth.net
Kristen Harrison, Professor of Speech at
UIUC
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