Many of the kids' fast food experience are highlighted with a toy, especially McDonald's Happy Meal.
One of the studies published in Journal of Pediatrics says that those kids who spend more time with TV and watch ads for kids' fast food meals with toy freebies are more expected to manipulate the whole family to eat more at fast food restaurants.
Geisel School of Medicine researchers at Dartmouth found only two popular fast food chains that advertise particularly on children's channel in 2009 by tracking and analyzing all the fast food ads that aired on TV on that year.
Based on the study, fast food commercials are effective tools of advertisement. 83 percent of kids asked their parents if they could visit at least one or both the fast food chain, 29 percent of kids collect happy meal toys, 37 percent of parents said they visited the fast food restaurants advertised on the TV more often than other restaurants.
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), stated that those children that learn information through TV are 'often' unable to distinguish what is the difference between right and wrong.
Kids are exposed to thousands of commercials every day that include an influence on taking alcohol, junk foods, fast foods and acquiring free toys.
The researchers consider that their result point to television commercial's function in children's food choices. Those children who always expend more than four hours each day in front of the TV are more prone to being overweight, and researchers have now verified that fast food industry could have a big effect on their weight increase.
On the other hand, parents don't yet know the strategy on how they could compete with the fast food industry that produces unhealthy meals for kids.
"Seventy-nine percent of the child-directed ads from those two restaurants aired on just four children's networks," according to the study's co-author Jennifer A. Emond, a research instructor from Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, during a press release. "For now, our best advice to parents is to switch their child to commercial-free TV programming to help avoid pestering for foods seen in commercials."
