The Post's obesity series: Touching on video games and food marketing

I've been impressed with The Washington Post's weeklong series on childhood obesity, which has covered multiple different angles on this topic with great graphics and video too. A story titled "Two Worlds, One problem" by Annie Gowen explored how obesity is an epidemic in both the suburban environment (where kids seem to have so many options for activity and still grow fatter) and the inner cities (where safety is a concern for outdoor play.) Gowen told the story of parents in Centrevile, Va., who were trying to tackle their son's growing waistline using different tactics. Some of them involved media: "Now McDonnell also locks up the Nintendo video game system," she wrote, "and has parental controls on the television.

Exploring another element of media's impact was Vicky Rideout, a vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation, who answered questions for the Post's online chat today. The foundation has published several studies on the influence of media and marketing on child health using well-designed surveys and focus groups. Rideout's talk today focused on how and if the marketing of high-fat, high-sugar foods may be implicated in children's unhealthy habits. This is a topic to which I devoted a chapter in my book as well. (I devoted several pages, for example, to the saga of the Disney Princess "Fruit Snacks" and my girls' unshakable desire for them.) During my work on the book, I was surprised to discover that current science points to junk-food advertising, instead of sedentary lifestyle, as the most plausible reason for the link between childhood obesity and TV watching.