Newsflash: TV Commercial Food Is Bad For You
We’ve been slacking in the “Medical news of the obvious” department lately. Seems like research has been either actually newsworthy or so obvious that you could spot it yourselves (for example, the continuing investigations of whether smoking and being lazy are bad for you).
But we couldn’t let this one slide by: “A new study that analyzes what would happen if a person were to eat 2,000 calories of foods that are advertised on the tube,” as HealthDay describes. As even the average Saturday morning cartoon viewer could have predicted, the food in commercials turns out to be bad for you.
“Researchers found that such a diet would include 25 times the recommended servings of sugar and 20 times the recommended servings of fat in a daily diet. But it would include less than half the recommended servings of vegetables, fruit and dairy products.”
The study authors think that their findings should lead to the development of educational programs for television consumers, including “interactive websites…that test a participant’s ability to identify imbalanced food selections from a list of options.”
Wouldn’t it be more fun, however, if it led to the development of new research and party games? What happens to your bank account if you buy every car that you see advertised? Or get your friends together to watch the evening news and pop a pill every time you see a commercial for one. Now that could have some surprising results.
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
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