Advertising and Parenting

I was amazed at the correlations that can be drawn from TV watching (and ad watching) and how it can lead to children and buying power. And you can't draw causation from correlations but they were still a bit staggering and in some cases more obvious. Like of course if you watch more TV you're going to be less fit, eat more and watch more TV ads for junky (HFSS) foods. It's almost as if we could fix a lot of kids (and therefore later on adults) health and eating problems by just taking away TV time. That's one thing my parents forced on my siblings and I at a young age. There wasn't no TV time, there just wasn't a TV. It's a bit drastic in my opinion but I grew not watching any TV that way. I wonder if less kids watched TV if they would instead follow how their parents ate and less so how ads showed them to eat?

Getting rid of TV and ads probably wouldn't be a magic bullet but it could help - a better way might be to teach kids to make their own decisions but how then to show kids an equal array of options? Parenting is going to play a big role but some kids are more likely to "figure" the whole health thing out while others won't. I was in a Montessori school with really young kids on the west coast (near Seattle) this summer for a day and the kids were extremely self-reliant and usually made their own lunches, packed them and were sharing as well as eating well. It was incredible to see.

The conclusions of the review article also were very interesting - that banning HFSS marketing ads could reduce childhood obesity is a really crazy thing to think about. It makes sense though, we don't allow most hard liquors and even some beers to advertise and we put restrictions on them for channels and time but we don't do anything for some foods that are just as harmful. Why is that? How would our entire country change if we stopped advertising HFSS foods? Could a limiting of advertising help push us in the right direction? Could it be the limit we need on kids to get them to eat healthier and think more about what they put in their bodies?