Should the U.S. pursue a ban, we would follow Sweden, Norway, and Finland as the only countries to have banned commercial sponsorship of children's programs. There are less radical approaches; with regard to limiting the tax deductibility tied to business advertising, the authors deduced that, since the corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, the elimination of the tax deductibility would be equivalent to increasing the price of advertising by 54 percent. Such an action could consequently result in the reduction of fast food ads by 40 percent for children, and 33 percent for adolescents.
The study was based on the viewing habits of nearly 13,000 children, and buttresses a December, 2005 report issued by the Institute of Medicine that found compelling evidence linking food advertising on television and increased childhood obesity. At that time, some members of the research team recommended congressional regulation of TV food ads aimed at children, but their report noted that a final, definitive link proving that adiposity in children increased by watching food commercials had not yet been made. The present analysis certainly adds more to that argument.
The Centers for Disease Control estimate that between 1970 and 1999 the percentage of overweight children ages 6 to 11 more than tripled. Adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19 also saw a significant increase, reaching 14 percent. Current science shows an 80 percent chance that an overweight adolescent will become an obese adult. The new analysis of the effects of TV food ads on kids is certainly another good reason to limit your child’s television time. After all, American households can produce a similar effect as a national ban by simply turning off the TV.
The war against obesity can be viewed as part of an even broader war against cardiovascular disease (CVD), which can lead so readily to early mortality. And the evidence is overwhelming that major predictors of CAD cluster together as an array of individual abnormalities in people (obesity among them), forming an overarching syndrome. In “Fearing the Other IRS,” we look closely at how these overlapping symptoms perform and why it’s useful to take on the syndrome conceptually as a whole.
