Did you know that before children can speak, most can recognize Ronald McDonald (Spurlock 20)? Or that McDonalds distributes more toys per year than Toys-R-Us (Spurlock 19)? This is because many junk food and fast food companies, such as Chuck E. Cheese’s, Coca Cola, and McDonalds, target commercials at young children for the sole reason that it will probably make them life-long consumers. This means they will eat less of the rarely advertised, healthier alternatives, which can lead to obesity. And with an increasing amount of commercials viewed by kids each year, the epidemic of obesity has been growing in children and adolescents. For this reason, we should put a stop to advertising junk food, and instead we should promote healthier, more nutritious food choices.
People may not realize how the epidemic of obesity in children has grown in the past few decades. According to a recent report, “Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past forty years” (Mayer par. 7). Also, “The average kid watches forty-thousand commercials each year, twice as much as in the 1970’s” (Tartamella 70). These two trends have occurred in almost the same time period, leading doctors to believe the two are related. Their beliefs can be backed up with a study conducted by Stanford Medical School’s Thomas Robinson. In his study, Robinson observed third and fourth graders. He observed how a reduction in the amount of time spent watching television changed the amount of products the kids asked for. It turned out that “The children whose television viewing time declined made 70 percent fewer…requests [for advertised products] than those in the control group, whose media habits were unchanged” (Schor 67). This shows that the more advertisements one is exposed to, the more likely they are to consume the products. More often than not, those products are unhealthy foods.
Major advertising companies argue that the increasing amount of obesity in children—or in anyone—isn’t directly related...