The Couch Potato Culture
...ed information about food choices and healthy lifestyles. Research studies have proved that excess viewing of television has lead to obesity. Many television advertisements encourage unhealthy eating habits, for instance, two-thirds of the 20,000 TV advertisements an average child sees each year are for food and most are for high-sugar foods. During the period of watching television, the metabolic rate seems to go even lower than during rest. The issue of body image is alarming. Women are led to believe that the media-created image of the ideal body is how their bodies should look. In women’s attempt to have “the ideal body”, they often end up adopting fad diets that may lead to more serious eating disorders. Men are also affected by this “perfect body” ideology. The desire of building muscles often leads to poor diet and the use of steroids as well. Researchers have written about how television influences on the development of attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). In 1970, the researcher Professor Werner Halperin suggested that the rapid changes of sounds and images on TV may overwhelm the neurological system of a young child and cause attention problems that show up at a later date. Dr. Mathew Dumont of the Harvard Medical School also suggested that the rapid changes of TV sounds and images may stimulate a child to imitate that dynamic behavior. Therefore, ADHD may simply result from the child subconsciously copying the frenetic pace of TV programs. It is important to highlight that an enormous brain development occurs in the first few years of life. This development occurs as a 'wiring' of the brain, making connections between the billions of neurons with which we are born. TV watching in the early years may affect this wiring. One of the most intense areas of research has been violence in the media. Most researchers contend there is a connection between televised violence and aggressive behaviors. By age 18, the average American adolescent will have viewed about 200,000 acts of violence on television alone. The level of violence during Saturday morning cartoons is higher than the level of violence during prime time. Media violence has affected our society by increasing aggressiveness and anti-social behavior, increasing fear of becoming victim, making people less sensitive to violence and to victims of violence, increasing the appetite for more violence in entertainment and in real life. Another important point to be considered is that media violence often fails to show the consequences of violence. As a result, there is an awareness of a few or any repercussions for committing violent acts. More than 1,000 studies on the effects of television and film violence have been done during the past 40 years. In the last decade the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the National Institute of Mental Health have separately reviewed many of these studies. Each of these reviews has reached the same conclusion: television violence leads to real world violence. The National Institute of Mental Health reported that "television violence is as strongly correlated with aggressive behavior as any variable that has been measured." A study conducted by the Surgeon General's Office in 1972, and updated in 1...