Despite - or perhaps because of - the barrage of information about food that they consume while watching television, kids are getting the wrong message about healthy eating.
A study has found that the more television kids watch, the more confused they are about which foods are - and which aren't - going to help them grow up strong and healthy.
Increased television viewing had, in fact, a double-negative effect on the children in the study. Regardless of their initial nutritional knowledge, the more television they watched, the less able they also were "to provide sound nutritional reasons for their food choices," said the author of the study, Kristen Harrison, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Foods marketed as aiding weight-loss were particularly problematical for the kids in the study. They equated the words "diet" and "fat-free" with being nutritious.
"When they were presented with choices like Diet Coke vs. orange juice and fat-free ice cream vs. cottage cheese, they were more likely to pick the wrong answer - the diet and fat-free foods - than when they were presented with choices without these labels, for example, spinach vs. lettuce.
"The labels 'diet' and 'fat-free' suggest that these foods are good for them and make it harder for them to pick the 'right' answer," Harrison said, noting that the goal of the study was "to gauge children's understanding of which food would help them grow, not make them slimmer."
TV advertising intentionally blurs the lines between diet and nutritional - in Harrison's words it "frames" diet foods by "equating weight-loss benefits with nutritional benefits." One TV ad for chocolate syrup, for example, runs the tagline, "as always, fat free."
"Child television viewers are bombarded with health claims in television advertising," Harrison said. "Given the plentitude of advertisements on television touting the health benefits of even the most nutritionally bankrupt of foods, child viewers are likely to become confused about which foods are in fact healthy."
Adults, Harrison said, should be able to understand the difference between foods that are healthy because they help one grow up, and foods that are healthy because they prevent one from growing out, "but this is too much to expect kids to understand."
Study findings appear in the most recent issue of the journal Health Communication. Harrison's research focuses on media effects on children and adolescents and the impact of media exposure on body image and eating disorders.
For the study, 134 children in the first through third grades were asked to respond to a questionnaire that measured their nutritional knowledge, nutritional reasoning and television viewing, once at the onset of the study and again six weeks later.
On average, the children reported that they watched 28 hours of television a week; there was no correlation between gender and age and the amount of television watched.
In the nutritional knowledge part of the study, children were presented with six pairs of foods and asked to choose which item in each pair was better for helping them "grow up strong and healthy." One food in each pair was predetermined to be more "nutritionally dense" than the other, Harrison said. The pairs were carrot/celery, rice cake/wheat bread, jelly/peanut butter, spinach/lettuce, fat-free ice cream/cottage cheese, and orange juice/Diet Coke.
The children displayed "moderate" nutritional knowledge, Harrison said. Out of a perfect score of 6, they got a median score of 3.7 the first time, and 3.92 the second. To test their nutritional reasoning, Harrison asked the children why they chose each food, and their answers were scored as representing either nutritional reasoning or non-nutritional reasoning. Examples of nutritional reasoning were: "More juicy, has vitamins (referring to celery)" or "It has cheese, cheese is made from milk, and milk is good" (cottage cheese).
Examples of non-nutritional reasoning: "It's chewy" (wheat bread) and "My brother hates it" (spinach).
The children also displayed moderate nutritional reasoning. "But as the study shows, this number decreases with heavier TV viewing, especially for the choices involving fat-free and diet labels."
One interesting finding was that children's nutritional reasoning was "largely independent of their nutritional knowledge."