14 DAY TRIAL // The fact that America has been experiencing a real obesity epidemic over the past few years shouldn't be news to anyone, given the number of statistics that mercilessly point this out. And while other countries, such as Sweden, Finland and Norway, have already taken concrete actions for reducing the number of people who eat mainly at fast food restaurants, it seems that US economists still think that implementing similar regulations is "economically unsustainable."
"We have known for some time that childhood obesity has gripped our culture, but little empirical research has been done that identifies television advertising as a possible cause," argued Shin-Yi Chou, an economist at the Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, which conducted a study on approximately 13,000 children recently.
He and his colleagues used data provided by the Department of Labor, gathered during the Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, conducted in 1979, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, conducted in 1997.
"Our results indicate that a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent," Chou explained, referring to the number of fast food-related ads that each family in the study viewed per week. Apparently, a tight connection exists between children's obesity rates and the number of commercials they see on television, the scientists also noted in their study, published in the Journal of Law and Economics.
Other studies concluded that, on average, American children under the age of 18 view some 40,000 fast food commercials yearly. Besides the effect this has on their subconscious mind, they also lose valuable exercise times by watching TV and can experience troubles sleeping. This adds to the health risks they are exposed to even further, making it easier for obesity to set in.