Yet another reason to get your kid away from the TV and into some other productive activity.  Television viewing has been shown to confuse children about what foods are healthy, according to a new study by the University of Illinois.  Just in case all the profanity, violence and other examples of negative behavior didn’t do it for you, this oughta do it…

The study, which was published in the journal Health Communication, indicates that that increasing television viewing in children resulted in increased confusion about which foods were healthy and which were not.  Diet foods were particularly difficult for the children to form correct opinions toward, with “diet” and “fat-free” foods being perceived as healthy by the children.

There is a good summary with some anecdotals on the University of Illinois website.  Some gems include:

• "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."
• ”...third-grade girl who chose cottage cheese over fat-free ice cream said she did so because “it has less calories."
• On average, the children reported that they watched 28 hours of television a week.  134 children in the first through third grades were asked to respond to a questionnaire that measured their nutritional knowledge, nutritional reasoning and television viewing, once at the onset of the study and again six weeks later.
• The report also cites “Previous studies that have found that 97.5 percent of the food commercials appearing on weekend morning TV network programming were for unhealthy foods – defined as products containing significant amounts of fat, sodium, cholesterol or sugar; for weekend evening programming, 78.3 percent of the commercials were for unhealthy foods."

[via HealthDay]