Childhood Obesity Generator? A Literature Review

Obesity generator? A Literature Review about the correlation between television advertisements and the food consumption of children

Introduction

For many, television is an integral part of daily life. It has been said that children grow up watching television. Against this backdrop, some question the impact of watching television food commercials on children’s health. Can they negatively influence one’s food consumption pattern? In a recent report published on The Guardian (Boseley, 2017), it was shown that childhood obesity rates have significantly gone up in the past few decades, with over 100 million children globally considered obese. As television viewing may be linked to childhood obesity, studies have been conducted to investigate the

The independent variable is television advertisements which can be defined as a non-personal communication via television with the goal to influence or persuade an audience paid by identified sponsor (Richards & Curran, 2013). The dependent variable, children’s food consumption, is defined as the daily intake of food. This study aims to answer the research question: To what extent does exposure to television advertisements influence the food consumption of children?

Search Process

All literature used in the investigation was accessed via the University of Amsterdam’s online library. This said database contains a wide variety of credential articles and is a useful starting point. Even though the topic is widely discussed in the media and elsewhere, the number of scientific peer-viewed articles on this topic is scarce. Examples of search terms used were: “television advertisements” AND “food consumption” AND “children”. This yielded a considerable number of articles but since this investigation is limited to peer-reviewed articles, three articles were deemed relevant.

Review of the Literatures

The three studies applies different methods in examining the links between television advertisements and food consumption among children, which might contribute to prevalence of childhood obesity. The introduction of the three studies in this literature review is ordered according to the published years as well as their scale and

All of the three studies conclude that exposure to television advertisements indeed influence the food consumption of children. In spite of the difference in method use, scale and complexity of the studies, the results of the studies to examine the relationship between exposure to television advertisements and the food consumption in children were always found significantly associated. Although the research question was answered by the literatures reviewed, there are still limitations in this