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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.
Were there brands that kids would care about shown as well, or just brands that they happen to know? I don't really see FedEx lighting up the pleasure center in a kid's brain, but Toys'R'Us or Mattel might. Other listed logos from the study are the Target bulls-eye and the Energizer Bunny. I might expect the bunny to cause a little bit of pleasure, but the cuteness of bunnies is balanced with the boringness of batteries.
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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.
When they reach puberty the logos will be replaced by other images, which they can easily find on the internet.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I swear the public doesn't get it. For 70 years, advertisers have been doing double blind studies on how to control and manipulate you. They go for your conscious mind, they go for your unconscious mind, they assault your pleasure centers, they know what frequencies in what order trigger certain centers in your brain. They are aware of when to target you by common daily habits and schedules. In short advertizing is a science with a cutting edge that make a scalpel look like a blunt instrument. They go after your biology, culture, demographic, political views, religious beliefs, you social opinions. Its one of the reasons we now see sound bite instead of meaningful campaigns. That my friends if the work of Wall street advertising as applied by politics which has degenerated into just one more product being sold to semi comatose mouth breathing pubic.
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.
And no amount of advertising can force you to buy something. It can let you know that thing exists, but you still get to make your own choice.
You overestimate the extent of free will. Advertisers don't spend billions a year just to let you know that McDonalds (still) exists. They do it because they absolutely can control your behavior. Maybe not reliably enough to force a specific person to eat there, but on the average, it works.
This is nothing short from mind hacking. There is only one way to beat them, don't watch commercials. Not an easy task though. This is why I stopped watch TV at age of 15 and thanks to adblock and similar addons I managed to remove them from my browsing experience.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
And no amount of advertising can force you to buy something. It can let you know that thing exists, but you still get to make your own choice. Humans are not mindless drones.
Advertizing influences us. We are social creatures who evolved to fit in with others. I garanty you - without any doubt whatsoever - that there are things you purchased that you would never have purchased without the advertizing. And if I asked you about it, you would have some sort of "reason" why you purchase that item - parroting much of the advertizer's "message".
People make most of their decisions based on emotion. Very rarely do folks sit down and do a cost/benefit analysis, pros and cons, etc ... about a purchase - it takes too long. It's easier and more gratifying for that quick indulgence.
The women who buy very large SUVs "because they have children and they need the space" - they have only 2. My parents got 3 kids around in a Chevy Vega. But these days people need gigantic light trucks for their TWO kids. Gee, I wonder what gave them that idea? Or let's look at the Mini in the States. When it first came out the advertizers had two very masculine men doing crazy shit with them. Why? They were afraid that the Mini would be considered a chick car like the Volkswagen Bug and the Porsche Boxster.
And there's religion - the most manipulative thing ever created by man.
No sir, we may not be mindless, but we sure are easily manipulated.
lets blame advertisers for poor parenting.
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This sort of response has always been stupid, in my view, but with the amount of knoledge we now have about nutrition, how we become obese, how advertising influences people etc etc etc, it is staggerign that there are still this sort of uninformed opinions about.
First of all, nobody is blaming it all on advertising - not least because there is a lot more going on than idiotic TV adverts. Like the fact that when you go to any shop (even so called health food shops) the ratio between sugary, fatty luxury snacks and appealing, genuinely healthy alternatives is something like one or two orders of magnitude, if I'm not much mistaken.
And secondly, blaming it on poor parenting or "lack of self-control" is just too much like blaming the victim. People make poor choices because they are not really given any real alternatives. It is so easy to blurt things like "just pull yourself together" - but do you even know how to do this? Can you teach this skill to others? Are you able to help people overcome their moments of weakness? If you know and cared, you wouldn't say this kind of shit.
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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To counter a joke with sad facts.
The truth is that study after study has found that nobody is immune to advertising -even as we all think we are (that's part of WHY we aren't).
Ask people - nearly all of them will tell you they look at products in the store and buy the best value product as determined primarily by the price.
Let them buy and not know you are watching: 85% of them will consistently buy the thing with the most appealing packaging even if it costs significantly more. If asked afterward, they rationalize it as believing it was better quality (without any actual reason for this belief).
The small 15% who really DO manage to consciously and deliberately override advertising (no, they are NOT immune, they just learned to recognize the response and deliberately ignore it - like choosing NOT to wank when you're horny) - are the same kind of people who shop with a calculator in hand and make damn sure they don't go over-budget - and dont' buy anything not on the list unless there were enough specials to put them UNDER budget by more than the extra costs.
Those people DO exist- and they are the reason shops have no-name brands. The same product in plain packaging bought in bulk and sold cheaper.
Those people buy the no-name (I'm one of them, most of the time anyway) stuff because we know it's the better value - but the more expensive pretty packaging stuff is stocked right next to it, and the vast majority of people buy THOSE.
The science simply disproves most of our free will illusions. I won't discount it's existence entirely - but make no mistake, the vast majority of our lives are responding to ancient urges without us ever actually rationally thinking about and questioning those actions - let alone choosing to do otherwise (though we can apparently). People who figured out what those urges are CAN and DO exploit this tendency.
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And she is going to be screwed when she gets out on her own.
How about you watch commercials and explain how they are trying to manipulate you?
I would rather my children and look at a commercial and take it apart, then be hidden from them until they end up on there own.
And just so you know, my kids have been able to take apart a commercial since they were 10.
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