Nutrition on TV - What Can it Mean for Your Health?
Posted by Anna Kaehler on Tue, Jul 13, 2010 @ 10:32 AM
I did what many of you may have done last night. I went home after work, collapsed on the couch and flicked on the TV before rallying to make dinner. It was just before primetime and the food commercials were in heavy rotation.
I sat and watched images of pizza, the latest fast food concoction, and snack foods – so many snack foods! – flood the commercial spots. I was reminded of an article I’d read the day before, published this June by the American Dietetic Association’s Journal. The article detailed cross-sectional research done over 84 hours of primetime TV and 12 hours of Saturday morning TV, analyzing the nutritional content of the advertised foods as a whole.
The results were nauseating.
The Breakdown
If you were to purchase and consume only the foods advertised during these most watched TV broadcast times, you would ingest 2,560% of your recommended allowance of sugars and 2,080% of your daily recommended fat. And you would be way over on your daily protein, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium.
The sad part is you’d only get 40% of the recommended daily servings for vegetables, 32% for dairy, and 27% for fruit.
Now, who would follow this kind of nutritional advice, you ask? I can’t answer that one, but according to a 2006 USA Today article,the average American household now contains more television sets that it does people. Oh, and the same article reported these TV’s are on an average of 8 hours a day.
We continue to battle an obesity epidemic in the US. And obesity does not simply mean excess weight; it can mean an inadequate intake of essential nutrients. The irony of this is that
essential nutrients such as calcium may actually help people maintain a healthy weight.* And primetime food ads?...maybe not so much.
Needless to say, I switched off the TV and cooked something from scratch.