14 DAY TRIAL // Over the years, companies advertising food have become a steady presence on the small screens, battering customers with ads about various products. Some individuals have gotten to the point where they base their diets entirely on how TV ads present reality, but researchers say that this is a very bad habit. They explain that a new investigation revealed that the main consequence of doing this was a very unbalanced diet. The situation is devastating on people's health, the scientists add in a new paper detailing the findings, which appears in the latest issue of the scientific Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
The results of the new study are based entirely on the nutritional values of the products being most often presented in TV ads. Investigators say that making food choices based on these commercials can result in people consuming as much as 25 times the recommended servings of sugars and 20 times the recommended servings of fat per day. In addition to bombarding the organism with so much sugar and fat – which promote diabetes, obesity and heart diseases – these products do not ensure even half of the necessary recommended amounts of vegetables, dairy, and fruits. As any savvy nutritionist will tell you, vegetables are the key to a healthy diet.
When devising the diets based on the TV ads, the team put them together in such a way that the result was consuming 2,000 calories, the daily recommended dose. “The results of this study suggest the foods advertised on television tend to oversupply nutrients associated with chronic illness (eg, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium) and undersupply nutrients that help protect against illness (eg, fiber, vitamins A, E, and D, calcium, and potassium),” says Armstrong Atlantic State University assistant professor and MPH program coordinator, Michael Mink, PhD. He was also the lead investigator of the new research efforts.
“First, the public should be informed about the nature and extent of the bias in televised food advertisements. Educational efforts should identify the specific nutrients that tend to be oversupplied and undersupplied in advertised foods and should specify the single food items that surpass an entire day's worth of sugar and fat servings. Second, educational efforts should also provide consumers with skills for distinguishing balanced food selections from imbalanced food selections,” the team writes in the journal entry.
“For example, interactive websites could be developed that test a participant's ability to identify imbalanced food selections from a list of options. This type of game-based approach would likely appeal to youth and adults. Third, the public should be directed to established nutritional guidelines and other credible resources for making healthful food choices,” the researchers conclude.