Food Commercials Make Overweight Teens Want Fast Food

New findings published in the journal Cerebral Cortex reveals that TV food commercials may push overweight adolsecents' brains to want fast-food or unhealthy snacks.

For the study, researchers at Dartmouth College examined brain responses to two dozen fast food commercials and non-food commercials in overweight and healthy-weight adoelscents between the ages of 12 and 16. Commercials were embedded within an age-appropriate show, "The Big Bang Theory" so that participants were unaware of the study's purpose.

"This finding suggests the intriguing possibility that overweight adolescents mentally simulate eating while watching food commercials," Kristina Rapuano, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "These brain responses may demonstrate one factor whereby unhealthy eating behaviors become reinforced and turned into habits that potentially hamper a person's ability lose weight later in life."

The study found that children and adolescents see an average of 13 food commercials a day.

"Unhealthy eating is thought to involve both an initial desire to eat a tempting food, such as a piece of cake, and a motor plan to enact the behavior, or eating it," Rapuano said. "Diet intervention strategies largely focus on minimizing or inhibiting the desire to eat the tempting food, with the logic being that if one does not desire, then one won't enact. Our findings suggest a second point of intervention may be the somatomotor simulation of eating behavior that follows from the desire to eat. Interventions that target this system, either to minimize the simulation of unhealthy eating or to promote the simulation of healthy eating, may ultimately prove to be more useful than trying to suppress the desire to eat."