From Yahoo!:
TV, Eating Out Makes Kids Fat, Studies Agree
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Excessive television watching and fat-laden fast food menus are working together to make U.S. children fatter and fatter, two separate reports said on Tuesday.
The reports by non-profit groups, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, were issued a day after the American Psychological Association published a new policy recommending legal limits on advertising aimed at children.
The Kaiser Foundation, which studies family health issues, said research had not pinpointed precisely why television watching is so strongly linked with childhood obesity. But experts told a briefing that evidence pointed strongly to advertising for junk and snack foods.
No kidding. Anybody here watch kids TV at all? Every other commercial is either for fast food or junk food. There are candy bars being marketed as breakfast cereal, every candy promises happiness, toys just for eating at McDonalds, and it seems to me that we're seeing more and more obese kids in regular kids television programming. There are at least three actors on Nickelodeon shows that are considerably overweight, which seems in a way to be a reinforcement of being overweight as a norm. I know, I know, maybe it is becoming the norm, but for most it is controllable - so why promote it?
Will the FCC say anything meaningful about obesity and television? Not likely. Will there be standards for the kinds of products that can be marketed to kids? We're lucky if we can keep our schools from selling Coke and Pepsi to our kids every day. Can the Department of Health, or the Department of Education, do something more aggressive to push a more active, less tube-oriented lifestyle for kids and their families?
What are the answers to this problem - if it is a problem - and who should lead?
Obviously, parents. Teaching kids to live happy, healthy lives is their job.
But who else? And how? What should government do?