Should Fast Food Advertising be Allowed In Schools?
Fast food restaurants are the major cause of obesity; they take advantage of kids by promoting irresistible advertising and the consequences these ones bring, are not very attractive. During the course of the years, a variety of countries have experienced an epidemic of obesity, in which fast food restaurants have been the major cause. This problem affects not only adults but children most.
These fast food companies have grown enormously, and some of the ways in which they show their products is by advertising. This tactic is very effective for these companies, but very damaging for the community, especially for children who are attracted to advertisements, commercials, and posters. In these ones, fast-food products look very provocative. Companies have been studying children’s behavior for a long time, as Eric Schlosser discusses In “Your Trusted Friends” they send cultural anthropologist into homes, stores, places where kids like to gather, quietly observing their action, searching for most minimum detail that may help when choosing the type of advertisement they would be offering them. This is really bad, when talking about health, because they have study kids so much that they come up with ideas of how to manipulate these kids so that they could get their parent to obtain these products.
The biggest concern with these foods is that they are made out of calories and fat, that not only affects our appearance but also our health. One of the most efficient ways to help our community and our children to end obesity or at least reduce the percentage of people enrolled in this problem is stopping fast-food ads, because if we do not see them the temptation to eat is smaller.
Children spend half of the day in schools. A place where they are suppose to learn new things, that would help them in their future, and also a place where they get to relate with others. When parents send their kids to school, they believe their going to a safety place, with a healthy environment. The last thing they would want is to have their kids learning the wrong material, like bad diet habits. This is what the big problem is; that schools are promoting these advertisings, that are giving kids the wrong impression of a good meal because that’s what they think they are, healthy products. Therefore one of the first places where there should not be allowed Fast food advertising is in schools, because when a child sees ads of fast-food many times a day the only thing this child will have in mind is these food products, and on their way home, most likely he will ask his parents to buy them. Another issue that has a lot to do with this is the hectic lives of many parents and their children, many times instead of a healthy well balanced meal, people are turning to fast food for a quick fix at mealtime.
Eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and not getting enough exercise are the major causes of obesity. Fast food products are full of calories that affect our health. As researcher Shanthy A. Bowman study has shown “The fats, sugar, and salt in fast food draw kids like a magnet, largely because they appeal to a child's "primordial tastes," .This taste triggers more eating later in the day. And, because fast food doesn't contain much fiber, kids don't feel full afterward -- so they eat more later”. And the portion large portion sizes contribute to overweight and obesity. Obesity comes with many other complication along it’s way, increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, breathing problems, trouble sleeping and it can also cause children and adolescents to suffer from a low-self esteem. Feeling different from their peers, affecting them not only physically, with their healthiness but also emotionally. The risk our kids faced when eating fast food are to dangerous, one of the biggest reason why schools should not patronize these companies, because they put our kids lives in danger. We need to be more conscious of what type of meals our kids are eating and what kind of environment are they exposed to not only outside but inside their schools too.
According to research many middle schools and high schools offer more unhealthy food than nutritious food. As John Koshuta states “The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) serves twenty-nine million school children every day and costs American taxpayers more than $7 billion a year to provide "nutritionally balanced" meals”. However most of these kids fill up with chips, cookies, sodas and a lot more junk food that don’t offer them nothing good but fats, calories and sodium. For all of these reasons is crucial to remove fast food advertising from every single school in the country because children deserve better lives.
A study by the researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research have shown that, a ban on fast food advertisements in the United States could reduce the number of overweight children by as much as 18 percent, a pretty big amount when we only talking about schools, this is the right place to start a healthy life, that others might follow. In conclusion fast food advertising should not be allowed in schools. Because this is a place where kids should feel safe and out of danger and these ads expose kids into eating unhealthy meals, that will only cause them their physical and emotional lives.
Work Cited
Koshuta, John. "Junk Food Ads, Fast Food Increasing Teen Obesity." Independent News on Natural Health, Nutrition and More. 09 Oct. 2007. Web. 28 Apr. 2010.
Davis, Jeanie Lerche. "Fast Food Creates Fat Kids." WebMD - Better Information. Better Health. Web. 29 Apr. 2010.
Schlosser, Eric.” Your Trusted Friends. “Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2001.31-58.Print
"Ban On Fast Food TV Advertising Would Reverse Childhood Obesity Trends, Study Shows." Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology. 29 Nov. 2008. Web. 29 Apr. 2010
