Children have hard time learning nutrition from food commercials, study shows

• A new study shows that children equate terms like "diet" and "fat free" with healthy because TV commercials equate weight loss benefits to nutritional benefits.
• "Given the plentitude of advertisements on television touting the health benefits of even the most nutritionally bankrupt of foods, child viewers are likely to become confused about which foods are in fact healthy," says researcher Kristen Harrison, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a news release.
• "We know that many American children are consuming too much fat and too many calories, but replacing the nutrient-dense foods in their diets with low-fat, low-calorie items like rice cakes and diet soda does them a disservice by depriving their bodies of the whole-food nutrients needed for growth," says Harrison.
• More than 100 children in the first through third grade answered a questionnaire that assessed their nutritional knowledge, nutritional reasoning and television viewing.
• "When they were presented with choices like Diet Coke vs. orange juice and fat-free ice cream vs. cottage cheese, they were more likely to pick the wrong answer -- the diet and fat-free foods -- than when they were presented with choices without these labels, for example, spinach vs. lettuce," says Harrison.
• Researchers also found that the more TV the children watched, the less likely they were to provide sound nutritional reasons, such as "More juicy, has vitamins (referring to celery).
• Instead, they were more likely to give reasons like, "It won't make you fat (referring to fat-free ice cream)," or "It's diet" (referring to Diet Coke).
• Overall, the study showed that the children displayed "moderate" nutritional knowledge and scored an average of about 4 out of 6 on the test.