It is often said that advertising is the main cause of unhealthy eating habits. Some think that there is nothing related between advertisement and unhealthy eating habits. However, I believe advertising is the primary cause of harmful eating habits for two reasons.
To begin with, the main purpose of advertisement is to attract people to buy companies' product. In order to accomplish the purpose, food advertisements usually tend to be exaggerated by food companies. For example, burgers which are the most representative sample of fast food look always bigger and delicious in television advertisement. Advertisement of burgers overstates their flavor, size and even nutrition. Like this, sometimes, they are not the same as the advertisement says. However, customers who watch that kind of advertisement generally believe it as it stands. Therefore some of them eat burgers indiscreetly everyday and it is the one of main causes of increasing the obesity rate.
In addition, advertising especially influences on children. Young children do not have an ability to judge whether advertisement is true or not. They are prone to accept advertiser messages as truthful and unbiased. This can lead children to unhealthy eating habits. For instance, there was a research for finding the correlation between children and television advertisement in the States. The experiment was conducted by professors at the University of California at Santa Barbara and they discovered that children in the age of eight are unable to critically understand televised advertisement so they are more likely to be easy targets for commercial persuasion. In this way, now that many children and teenagers are deceived by the food ads and it plays a significant role in increasing the rate of obesity.
In conclusion, food advertising makes people to buy the food without enough consideration. Had not been for television advertisement, we might have had much less number of people who have unhealthy eating habits. Therefore it cannot be deniable that advertising cause unhealthy eating habits.
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