Living-Smartly.com – Being Wise, Healthy and Financially Sufficient

Junk Food Ads Make Children Hungry: University of Liverpool, UK

The children of today’s generation are more exposed to televisions, mobiles and Internet. Children are affected badly by various features of these electronic devices. Among them, commercial advertisements are one of the badly influencing factors. Though not all ads are harmful, few ads do create negative effects on children, especially on their health. Recently, a study conducted by the experts from University of Liverpool has proved the same.

According to the research published in the Pediatrics, television ads on junk foods really do make children hunger for those treats, especially if they watch television a lot. This increase in appetite in turn causes lot of health problems and even makes children obese.

The study was conducted on 6-13 year old children, by the researchers from the University of Liverpool, UK. They found that commercials of junk foods and other fast foods seemed to increase the children’s appetites for sweet and high fat food. They also reported that food commercials increased the preferences for branded foods and also for all other food items in regular TV viewers when compared to low television viewers.


The same children on which the research was conducted do not have much impact when they watched TV ads related to toys, but the junk food ads reported a greater desire for high carb and high fat foods. This is more in case of children who watch TV for more than three hours a day, says the researchers.

However, the researchers are saying that the effects of the TV commercials were modest since they only increase the appetite and they are not sure whether they consume them right then or not. There are a lot of factors which should support them to have the items they watch on TV like the willingness of their parents, their financial status and the availability of those products.

Some experts from California expressed their opinion on this study saying that, the study confirmed the cumulative and sustained effect of food marketing on TV. That is, the more the children watch TV, the more susceptible they are to the commercials. This is good in one way if the food marketers advertise some best foods, but they don’t, added the experts.

They also advised the parents to restrict the children from spending more hours before the TV or Computers or Mobile, as now a days, TV can be watched from any of the above gadgets.