The TV Ad Diet

I always get a good laugh when TV stars smugly state during interviews — interviews on TV — promoting their TV shows that they don’t watch TV and they don’t even own a TV.

Wait… what? So they’re on TV, promoting their new TV show, making a living from TV… and acting superior because they don’t watch the idiot box themselves?

Hypocrisy and the question of whether TV abstinence is morally superior aside, not watching TV might be the reason those stars are lean. (Well, that and the team of personal chefs and trainers.)

TV and obesity

We know that research links TV watching to obesity. But what’s the connection?

There are three main ways that TV could lead to obesity.

Connection 1: Sitting watching TV = not moving much

The most obvious is that if you’re watching TV you’re probably not doing anything else, so you’re less physically active. And for those of you who watch TV while working out, either you’re not paying attention to your workout or you’re not paying attention to your TV show.

For example, I met a nice little old lady who would come to her apartment complex gym and bike on the recumbent bike for an hour while watching Law & Order: SVU. Six months passed and she asked me why she wasn’t losing weight. I mentioned that she should try to make her workouts more difficult and maybe try walking on the treadmill, since she was able to do her current workout in her slippers.

Connection 2: More TV = more eating

People eat more food when they watch TV. You sit down with a bag of chips while watching your favourite show, and next thing you know you’ve eaten the entire bag.

Not only do you eat mindlessly, you start to associate TV watching with filling your face. Next time you sit down to watch, you think “I should be eating something.” Munch munch munch… uh oh, another bag bites the dust.

Connection 3: More food marketing = more eating

The last way TV could lead to obesity is different than the other two, because it lasts past the time actually watching TV.

TV, specifically TV commercials , can influence what we eat at other times. This is the basis of all marketing — affecting people’s choices.

Let’s say some evening you’re watching TV, and you see an ad for ice cream. Man, that looks good. Creamy, cold, studded with chocolatey nuggets…

An hour or so later, you turn off the tube and think Snack time! And what would go down perfectly? Why, ice cream of course! You’ve forgotten the commercial (at least consciously), but somehow you sure haven’t forgotten that tub of Haagen Dazs in the freezer. (By the way, make a mental note: If you feel any ice cream urges in the next few hours, ignore them.)

How bad could TV commercials be for our diet?

Well, the study for this week’s review addresses this question in a fun way: What if you just ate the foods you saw advertised on TV? What would your nutrition intake look like?

Mink M, Evans A, Moore CG, Calderon KS, Deger S. Nutritional imbalance endorsed by televised food advertisements. J Am Diet Assoc. 2010 Jun;110(6):904-10.

Methods

Researchers asked two questions:

• What food is typically advertised on TV?
• What’s the nutritional content of those foods?

Step 1: Watch TV

To answer the first question, researchers watched over 96 hours of American TV (ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC): 84 hours during prime time and 12 hours on Saturday mornings.

To give you an idea of the kinds of ads they might have been seeing, let’s take advertisements from the last Super Bowl (American football finals) as an example. Now, that wasn’t a part of the 96 hours but it’s the most prized ad time in the US. And it gives us a little slice (so to speak) of what the researchers might have seen.

Of all the ads, 24 were ads for food (I use the classification loosely). And, as you can see below, if you ate only food you saw in the advertisements you wouldn’t be getting a lot of nutrients. Calories yes, but not many nutrients. Here’s what was advertised in my Super Bowl example:

• Dr Pepper Cherry cola
• Snickers chocolate bar
• Taco Bell restaurants
• Papa Johns restaurants
• Emerald nuts & popcorn
• Michelob beer
• Select 55 beer
• Coke (2 advertisements)
• Denny’s restaurants (3 advertisements)
• Doritos chips (4 advertisements)
• Budweiser beer (7 advertisements)

Only the Emerald nuts & popcorn ad would give you a decent amount of nutrients without a lot of calories or unwanted sugar, fats, or processing.

Step 2: Food ad nutritional analysis

Most of us could look at that list above of Super Bowl “food” ads and feel pretty confident in saying there might be some nutritional imbalances there.

The researchers wanted to be a little more scientific, however, so they actually did nutritional analysis on the food.

They used the quantity provided in the ad (e.g. a quarter-pound hamburger with a slice of cheese and a bun, or a large-sized bag of chips). If portion size wasn’t obvious in the ad, the food wasn’t included in the analysis.

Researchers analyzed both nutritional content and the number of servings compared to the US Food Guide Pyramid.

Results

Although researchers watched 96 hours in total, they only analyzed 89.5 hours. Either 6.5 hours didn’t have advertisements (e.g. political debates for elections) or the scientists messed up their recording and didn’t record the hours (don’t you feel better that you couldn’t program your VCR?).

Good news: there were 116 public service announcements! Bad news: none talked about nutrition.

In the nearly 90 hours of TV there were 3,584 ads. 17% were advertising food in one way or another, but 56 ads had food that couldn’t be analyzed by the nutritional software.

How could this be? The food was too new, so it hadn’t been analyzed in a lab and added to the software database.

Generally speaking, I avoid new food, because it usually falls into the spray-on cheese food group, or “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Really Food!” category (even though it’s an unnatural hue of yellow).

Late Night with Sugar & Fat Show

This left the researchers with 677 foods. Here are the results. The chart below compares the actual daily servings of food components shown in the ads, versus the number of servings recommended in the USDA Food Pyramid.

Actual versus recommended servings of food types

The only group was close to the recommended levels was grain, with 8 servings in TV ads and 8.5 servings recommended.

Yes, the food pyramid might not be the best thing to compare to, but lets look at nutrients. You’d get 122% and 137% of the recommend daily value of cholesterol and saturated fat, respectively, for a 2000 calorie diet.

While you’re getting too much of some nutrients, you’d be running a deficit of other things. The chart below shows common nutrients such as vitamin A, B5, D, and E as well as important minerals. Most fell well below the RDA.

For instance, if you ate a diet composed of TV ad food, you’d end up with 35% of the recommended vitamin D, and 43% of the recommended fibre.

Nutrients by percent of RDA (100%) in advertised foods

Conclusion

A lot of TV… and a lot of sugar and fat

We know that TV marketing successfully influences food choices. Americans watch or listen to an average of 6.75 hours of TV per day. Every year they take in nearly 15,000 food ads, which rarely feature salads or Supershakes.

So it’s not surprising that people’s food choices are skewed to high-calorie, low-nutrient food. After all, food in TV ads would provide you with about 26 times the daily recommended servings for sugar and nearly 21 times the daily recommended servings for fat.

What to do?

The researchers of this study recommend that consumers should be educated about the bias of TV ads, in the nutritional recommendations, and in healthy food choices. They also suggest that the food industry should be educated about these nutritional imbalances, to help them move towards providing healthier products.

I may be cynical, but the food industry, just like any industry, is driven by economics. If they sell a product that makes them a lot of money — healthy or not — they will not stop producing it.

In fact, as David Kessler has pointed out in his book The End of Overeating, companies are perfectly well aware that they aren’t manufacturing broccoli smoothies — indeed, they purposely hire food scientists to figure out how to jam more sugar, fat, and salt into their products.

The researchers suggest that government policies change too, to restrict TV ads or include disclaimers in them, much like restrictions on tobacco advertising. While other countries (such as France, Thailand, China, Denmark, Finland, Malaysia, Korea, Romania and the Phillippines) have restricted food ads, I don’t know if having a disclaimer saying soda pop is high in sugar is going to make much of a difference to adult viewers.

Do we know all the factors yet?

An aside: People are concerned about sex and violence on TV too. Yet the murder rate’s gone down in the US since 1999, and I don’t hear too much about how sex is one of the top killers.

In any case, the Center for Disease Control in the US lists the top causes of death in 2007. The top three are heart disease, cancer, and stroke (cerebrovascular diseases) — all with a diet component.

Thus, I suspect we don’t know all the factors in what inspires complex human behaviour. Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence tarnishing food ads is still pretty strong.

Bottom line

Be aware of your TV viewing habits and how these affect your food choices subconsciously.

Regardless of exactly how much food ads affect your purchasing and eating behaviour… should you really be glued to the set for 6.75 hours a day anyway? Couldn’t you be learning a foreign language, playing the guitar, or catching up on much-needed beauty sleep?