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Fast-Food Logos Burned Into Pleasure Center of Children's Brains
bbianca127 writes "A study has found that fast-food logos are branded into the minds of children at an early age, perhaps fueling the U.S.'s obesity epidemic. The study showed children 60 logos from popular food brands and 60 logos from popular non-food brands. Researchers found that, when shown images of fast-food brands, the parts of kids' brains linked with pleasure and appetite lit up. This is concerning because marketers tap into those portions of the brain long before children develop self-control, and most foods marketed to kids are high in calories, sugar, sodium, and fat."
I have always thought that exposure to fast food at an early age (perhaps due to mom and dad being perennially short of time to cook) implants a memory into kids of the taste of greasy fast food that sticks with them forever. Don't feed them this glop.
There is good evidence that food preferences starts with the first solid food. Most infants (at least in the US) are started on white rice cereal and this has been shown to lead to a preference for high glycemic index foods (simple sugars and starches) leading to obesity. They have found that brown rice (low glycemic index) is much better.
Much better to start with low glycemic index foods (and stay with them for life).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
long before children develop self-control
This is true, self control is something that develops slowly and isn't present in young children. This is why parents need to provide a substitute for that self control. When I was young my family ate every meal at home, from healthy home cooked food. We NEVER ate at fast food joints, and weren't exposed to fast food advertising. Surprise, now in late middle age (50) I am thinner and in better physical condition than 95% of the country. I've run up flights of steps and seen 20 year olds who can't keep up without wheezing and having to stop for breath.
A whole generation of parents seems to have dropped the ball. I see children who eat every meal at McDonalds, and are obese by age 6. I see children who badly need exercise driven around by their parents for distances easily walkable. The parents are enabling this problem through lack of parental responsibility for their own children. This is not rocket science: if you eat twice as many calories per day as you burn, you're going to get fat. How did we get so stupid as a nation that we no longer understand this? It seems like whacking one's self on the thumb with a hammer, and wondering why it hurts... over and over and over, never learning that it's our own swinging of the hammer that hurts. Not all the advertising in the world can MAKE you go to McDonalds. You have to chose to do so. You are free to choose NOT to do so, and this is the choice I've made all my life.
It's just... bewildering to see people make the opposite choice, eat several big macs per day coupled with massive high calorie sodas and large fries, and then bitch about getting fat. Stop doing that! If you're a parent, instil a sense of basic reality in your children, and don't feed them a diet of fast food when they're young enough to be dependent on you. It makes me sick to see so many parents hauling their 5 kids to fast food joints for every single meal.
To find no difference, you'd need to compare them with logos of healthy food that comes with cheap plastic toys and a playground. I find my children quickly stopped asking to go to McDonalds when I started buying them a cheeseburger, chips and orange juice from the a-la-carte menu for taking out, instead of a "Happy Meal" and eating in and letting them use the playground there.
Ta da!!! Superb call good sir! My friends, until they have pubic hair, NO TV. I know 5 different families whose kids never watched the tube before they were near the end of puberty. The outcome is striking. The kids are brighter, more well balanced, more socially mature, more responsible, more productive and better disciplined. I mean its shocking. I can't say that they are better because the parenting was better, or that the simple lack of TV made such an incredible difference, but it left me with the experience that TV is profoundly destructive to the developing human brain and should simply be eliminated from the childrens' intellectual diet.
I get annoyed with the "Mod parent up!" posts, but damn, that's insightful. Parent of a 12 week old here. I'll remember that.
As a very young kid, I remember Mom taking me to McDonalds on the way to pick up my older brother from school. It was only for the playground. She never bought me any food there. And I always wanted fruits instead of candy at the grocery store. Guess she was onto something.
:wq
Yes, it's very interesting, I only have a laymans understanding of the subject(s) involved. My degrees are all in other areas.
What I have understood however is that the genetic component may be far more important than the diet itself for individuals. The Mediterranean diet may only work well for people with [that or] similar genetic makeup and/or environmental conditions (climate, eating patterns, etc). Consuming butter heavy, low carb diets (Ketogenic) has recently become a fad here in Scandinavia. It even lead to a butter "shortage" before Christmas due to our agricultural policy (protectionist/self-sufficiency).
From what I have read and seen a lot of industrial food products in the US may have everything from trans-fats, [traces of] anti-biotics and growth hormones and frequently contains High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). The variation of products with corn derivatives is incredible, from beer to dry-wall! We know long-term consumption of HFCS leads to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats (triglycerides).
That's why I'm thankful that HFCS is not common in food products here in Scandinavia, even our [non-light] sodas use real sugar. It may be part of the obesity problem, in addition to the lack of exercise.
I remember reading one particularly interesting [American] study on the effects of poor nutrition, lack of healthy alternative food sources and polluted natural environments on the urban poor, and how it effectively locked them in poverty, poor health, low education, unemployment and crime. A cycle that is very hard to break. Think of all the money save and problems we could avoid in health care, welfare and crime prevention!
While I wouldn't call McDonald's "high quality" food anywhere, I do notice distinct quality difference in different countries.
Their burgers in Australia and New Zealand tend to both be quite high quality, with good meat; fresh lettuce / salad parts; and fries that are recognisably made from potato. Here in Germany, the standard is somewhat lower; but still not so bad. France seems somewhat lower than here in Germany - bordering on "I'm not sure I want to eat that". And the UK is even lower at "I'm quite sure I don't want to eat that".
For the absolute bottom of the scale though, the one time I ate McDonalds in the US, I was absolutely unable to eat more than a couple of bites due to the poor quality. The bun was literally sweet with the amount of sugar used in it; the meat was over-salted and tasted more like a beef/pork mix than pure beef (which is fine when it is really a mix, but when it is supposed to be beef, that's a bit of a concern); and the fries were more fat/oil than potato matter. Even the drink tasted syrupy and weird (I found that in bottled drinks there also though; so I'm assuming it's the difference between the HFCS based versions and the sugar-cane based versions that I'm used to)
It might not always be like that there, and indeed may vary from state to state or store to store even; but that one time (which was at LAX airport for the record) has turned me off the idea of trying it there ever again.
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