An article in the AJC talks about two studies which focus on the relationship between fast food television ads and childhood obesity. The article claims that the first study found that there could be a slight decrease in childhood obesity by ending an advertising expense tax deduction for fast-food restaurants, but the article does not include any supporting evidence. It does not even say how the researchers went about testing and finding these results. It throws in some statistics alongside these results of the first study, but it does not say how these numbers were calculated. They say that there would be an eighteen percent decline in the number of obese young children and a fourteen percent decline in the number of obese older kids if a fast food ads were banned, but the article just said that this is what the researchers claimed without saying how they went about getting these statistics.
They may have not even taken into account that children who were already obese were already couch potatoes regardless of what they watched on television. Also, the social class in which the children belonged or how many fast food restaurants were located around where they lived could should have been taken into account. In saying this, the title of this article is also kind of misleading; correlation does not equal causation. Obesity could have already been prevalent and thus been a factor in what and how much television was watched as opposed to more active children in a normal weight range.
The second study seemed to be more reliable because the article mentions an actual journal in which this study could be found, the Journal of Law & Economics, so the reader can follow their procedure and find how the researchers went about doing their calculations. In this article, the reader is told that the results of the study were taken from a survey and thousands of American families were surveyed, eliminating any possible biases; in the survey, the researchers did take into account the income of the children’s parents and how many fast food restaurants were around their home. They also made sure to include the possibility that the children were already overweight regardless of their tendencies of watching television. The second study did a better job and seemed more believable because they did not just sprinkle their research with numbers and statistics, but actually included their calculations and removed any possibility of biases. The article, however, did not clearly state what the results were, but this is not too much of a concern since the reader can find the results in the journal, and I believe that that is better than stating false information or implying causation where there is only correlation.
http://www.ajc.com/search/content/health/stories/2008/11/20/banning_fast_food_tv_ads.html
