Weight Loss and Food Advertisements in Magazines

As I am sure almost everyone knows, obesity is a large problem in America. According to the Gallup poll of well being, 63.1% of Americans are overweight or obese. Since such a large percentage of the U.S. population is obese, it is not surprising that there are a lot of articles (and even whole magazines) devoted to weight loss. Today, when I walked by the magazine rack at the Dartmouth bookstore, I saw a bunch of different headlines about weight loss, from Jennifer Lopez's post-baby body to How to Lose 5 pounds in 7 days. I wondered how high exposure to weight loss tips and stories affects the U.S. population? Does it help people? Or could it potentially harm them? I also wondered if the dieting advice and stories offered healthy advice.

One of the magazines that caught my eye was The Atlantic. The cover story was " Fat Nation". The link to the story is: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/beating-obesity/8017/. Marc Ambinder, the author of the article writes about how America can beat obesity. He states that fighting obesity is a complex problem and would require multiple reforms. In one of the paragraphs, Ambinder talked about a study that a group of psychologists held at Yale University. There were two different groups of children; both watched the same cartoon. In one group, the children watched the cartoon with food commercials and in the other group, the children watched the cartoon with non-food commercials. They found that the kids who saw the cartoon with food commercials ate almost 50% more of the snack that the researchers offered them. The researchers found that, “Across diverse populations,food advertising that promoted snacking, fun, happiness, and excitement (i.e., the majority of children’s food advertisements) directly contributed to increased food intake.” Does this apply to adults? I looked at the study mentioned in Atlantic, "Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior. In the journal article, the researchers mentioned that adults also consume more snacks when they watch food commercials. These experiments demonstrated that food advertisements are a contributor to the obesity epidemic.


I wonder if this is true for food advertisements in magazines? Will unhealthy food advertisements in magazines cause people to snack on unhealthy foods or consume more food? I decided to pick one magazine, People, out of the rack to look at the food advertisements. Most of the celebrities featured in People are thin and it commonly has inspirational weight loss stories. So I was surprised to find McDonald's and Hot Dog advertisements in the magazine.If People promotes healthy food choices shouldn't it only contain healthy food advertisements? Do you think think that the government should place restrictions on food advertisements in magazines as part of "the fight against obesity"?


But its not only the food advertisments in magazines that contribute to unhealthy eating habits. Some researchers have also found that high exposure to dieting advice and stories in magazines can be harmful. The link to the study I looked at is:
http://www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/119/1/e30. The researchers looked at 2516 middle school and high school students in Minnesota. They found that female teenagers who read magazine articles about dieting and weight loss were a lot more likely to try unhealthy and extreme diet measures. The author of the article suggested that magazines reduce the number of diet and weight loss stories. I definitley agree with the author. I think that magazines overemphasize weight and commonly highlight weight loss techniques that don't seem very healthy.

For example, in a lot of magazines there are articles about post-pregnancy weight loss. An article called, " The Post-Pregnancy Weight-Loss Obsession" ( http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-23/the-post-pregnancy-weight-loss-obsession/) provides some examples:

"Sarah Michelle Gellar is back in her “skinny jeans” just four weeks after giving birth to her daughter, reports Us Weekly. Ditto Ellen Pompeo, I read in People. Twice, Heidi Klum walked the Victoria Secret runway just six weeks after having a baby. Natalia Vodianova topped them all, taking to the catwalk a mere two weeks after giving birth."

" Contrast this information with Us Weekly celebrating Ashlee Simpson-Wentz for sticking to her 1,500-calorie-a-day post-pregnancy diet, People discussing Liv Tyler’s postpartum fasting and colonics, or Ok magazine’s “Baby Weight Secrets,” which advise women to stick to fat- and carb-free diets and spend hours exercising daily."


The examples of post-pregnancy weight loss that these magazines provide are incredibly unhealthy. It is not normal for a woman to lose all of her baby weight in a month. In fact, the Mayo Clinic, advices women to lose no more than a pound a week post-pregnancy. They say that it may take up to six months or more for a woman to lose all of her pregnancy weight. If women read the articles about celebrity's fast post-pregnancy weight loss, they may feel pressured to lose weight at an unhealthy rate.

Race in Popular Magazines- Part 2

After my trip to Barnes and Nobles, I became curious about how magazines choose who to feature on the cover of their magazine. I thought that maybe this could help explain the discrepancy between the actual racial make-up of the U.S. and the races of people on magazine covers. I know that editors need to make magazine covers alluring and intriguing in order for people to buy the issue. On Forbes.com,I found a list of celebrity's deemed " Most Valuable". In 2008, they analyzed the six most popular celebrity magazines: People, Star, US Weekly, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and OK and found which celebrities sell the most copies. They found that the 10 most valuable celebrities were:

1) Angelina Jolie
2)Jennifer Aniston
3)Heath Ledger
4)Jamie Lynn Spears
5)Nicole Richie
6)Jessica Simpson
7)Suri Cruise (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's daughter)
8)Shiloh Jolie Pitt ( Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's daughter)
9)Heidi Montag
10)Owen Wilson

I understand that this is a limited sample, because Forbes only looked at six different magazines. However, 90% of the "most valuable" celebrities on the Forbes list are white. The only exception is Nicole Richie who is multiracial. This could potentially explain why I found that celebrity magazines were the least racially diverse ( in terms of the races of the people on their covers). Is the celebrity magazine readership primarily white? Are celebrity magazine editors marketing towards white readers?

I found an interesting paper online entitled: Printed in "Black" and "White": Effect of Readers Race on Magazine Advertising Rates that helped answer some of my questions. The author of this paper looked at how the racial composition of a magazine's readership affects their advertising rates. They focused on 78 mainstream magazines ( magazines that are not targeted to a particular racial group). They found that how much advertisers are willing to pay for advertising space in a magazine is dependent upon the race of the people who read the magazine. According to the paper, advertisers have access to the racial demographics of each magazine. In fact, they found that a 1% increase in minority readership of a magazine caused a $1202.70 decrease in advertising prices. But a 1% increase in white readership causes a $1202.69 increase. In other words, they found that if a "mainstream" magazine markets towards non-white readers, their revenue will fall. This shows that advertisers are more focused on the racial composition of the readership rather than the sheer number of readers.This really surprised me because I assumed that advertisers would simply be interested in how many readers the magazine had. The difference in advertising prices could explain why certain magazines feature a disproportional percentage of white people on their covers. The author of the paper proposes a solution at the end of her work: that the advertisers should not be able to see the racial demographics of magazine's readerships.

What do you think about her solution? Do you think that the advertising prices based on the minority readership of a magazine are fair?

Race in Popular Magazines

This weekend I was sitting on a bus reading a bunch of celebrity gossip magazines (People, Us Weekly), when I noticed a startling trend. The vast majority of the people on the magazine pages were white. This realization inspired me to change my blog topic and instead focus on how people of different genders, races, ages, and backgrounds are portrayed in different popular magazines.

I decided to go to the Barnes and Nobles in Hanover to examine the 7 display cases of magazines. For my first blog entry I wanted to look at how people of different races were portrayed in magazines. First I looked at all 110 of the magazines that had people on their covers. While there are a multitude of races and cultural identities, for simplification purposes, I categorized all of the cover people into six racial categories: White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian and Other. I compared the race of the people on the covers of the magazines to the actual U.S. race demographics. Here is what I found:

When I was looking at my results, some things that I noticed was:

- The percentage of white people on the covers of magazines is greater than the percentage of white people in the U.S. population.

- The percentage of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and American Indians on the covers of magazines is lower than the actual percentage of these race groups in the U.S. population.

Do these results surprise you?

Do you think that the percentage of people of each race on the cover of magazines should be equal to the percentage of these race groups in the U.S. population?

Next, I divided the magazines into 5 different categories: Health/Fitness/Sports, Celebrity/Entertainment, Womens' ( magazines that have a mostly female readership such as Redbook), Politics/ Business, and other. I did this because I noticed that the percentages of people of each race on the covers of these different types of magazines was different. I also compared these to the U.S. race demographics.

For the Health/Fitness/ Sports magazines, my findings were:
One thing that I noticed was that Sports/Health/Fitness Magazines had the highest percentage of black people on their covers than any other type of magazine.

- Do you think that this reveals anything about how the media portrays black people?

For the Celebrity/Entertainment magazines my findings were:
Out of the 30 womens' magazines at the Barnes and Nobles, 83% of them had a white person on the cover, while white people are roughly 66% of the U.S. population.

- I wonder why there is a higher percentage of white people on the covers of womens' magazines than there is in the U.S. population. Do magazines with white people on the cover sell more issues than those with other races on the cover?

For the Celebrity/Entertainment magazines I found:

The Celebrity/Entertainment Magazines where the least diverse type of magazine in terms of who they featured on their covers. 89% of the people on Celebrity/Gossip magazines at Barnes and Nobles were white. There were also no Asian, Hispanic or American Indians on any of the covers.

Why would Celebrity/ Entertainment magazines be the least diverse type of magazine?

For the Business/Politics magazines I found:
The Business/ Politics magazines were the most diverse in terms of who they featured on their covers. Unlike the other types of magazines, Business/Politics magazines had a lower percentage of white people on their covers than the percentage of white people in the population. I wonder if this is a conscience decision. If it is what does it say about how the media is trying to portray business and politics?


Personally, I think that the people featured on the covers of popular magazines should be representative of the U.S. population. The U.S. population is very racially diverse, so I feel that magazines should strive to show people of all different races.