More TVs at home lead to more fast food consumption

According to researchers, fast food TV ads have great influence on children, especially if a free toy is offered along with food.

Washington D.C.: A new study has revealed that the more frequently a child views child-directed fast food TV ads, often involving a toy, the more likely the family visits the fast food restaurant that was featured in the advertising.

Greater child commercial TV viewing was significantly associated with more frequent family visits to those fast food restaurants; toy collecting partially mediated that positive association.

However, the study confirms a link between child-directed TV advertising for fast food restaurants offering toys, and visits to those restaurants.

These results were quite alarming.

Researchers added that approximately 80% children were influenced from the two advertised restaurant chains’ on those four children’s channels.

Jennifer A Emond and colleagues from Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth used a database compiled them of all the TV ads for fast food aired across the nation in 2009.

Fifty-four percent of the children requested visits to at least one of the restaurants.

Certain factors were linked to more frequent restaurant visits, including the following: having more TVs in the home, a TV in the child’s bedroom, more time spent watching TV during the day, and more time spent watching one of the four children’s networks airing the majority of child-directed ads.

“For now, our best advice to parents is to switch their child to commercial-free TV programming to help avoid pestering for foods seen in commercials”, Emond said in a journal news release. About 83 percent of kids asked their family to visit the two restaurant chains, while almost 30 percent collected the toys. The rapidly moving images, the bright and shiny colors that attract their eyes and dominate their attention, the very good looking food, which, normally, has nothing to do with what you really get when you go to the restaurant, the songs and jingles that get stuck in their heads, the promise of a toy if you go and eat there, all of them attract your child in an unspeakable manner and make him effectively crave fast food.

Based on the study, fast food commercials are effective tools of advertisement.

But marketers and child psychology experts had long known that child-directed ads that are aired on children’s networks are extremely persuasive. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry explained that children are most vulnerable because they can not discern right from wrong. But health experts recommend children under the age 2 to stay away from TV, while older kids should not watch more than 2 hours.