Essay #1 by Carolina

Should Fast Food Advertising be Allowed In Schools?

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 students who are exposed to advertisements a lot in their 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.
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 ads, 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 minute 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.
Children spend half of the day in schools. Places 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 they’re going to a safe place, with a healthy environment. The last thing they would want is to have their kids learning the wrong material, for example poor eating habits. The big problem is; that schools are promoting these advertisements, which 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 fast food advertising should not be allowed is in schools, because when a child sees fast-food ads many times a day the only thing this child will have in mind is these food products, and on their way home, most likely they will ask their parents to buy them. Another factor is the hectic lives of many parents, 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”. They know that children have a taste for salty, fatty and sweet foods which most of the time are empty calories that result in 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 physicall and with their health, 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 are only talking about schools, this is the right moment to start a healthy life, a big step 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. There is something we could do to help our community and our children end obesity or at least reduce the percentage of people enrolled in this problem and is by stopping fast-food ads, because if we do not see them the temptation to eat is smaller.




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