Does Eating While Watching TV Affect Preschool Children’s Intake?
An experiment to show if watching T.V. and eating lunch or snacks affect the increase or decrease of the child’s intake. This is a safe experiment because it is guided by the children’s parents that were recruited from the children health center.
Children in the United States spend almost 20 hours per week watching television. Recent studies show that a large proportion of young children’s meals are consumed during TV viewing, but little is known about the impact of TV viewing on concomitant food intake in children. Recent tests show that eating while playing video games or watching T.V. may affect on the intake of minerals you get from the food.
Hypothesis
The objective of this study was to examine the effects of TV viewing on preschool children’s concomitant food intake, and to examine whether age, sex, weight status, or TV viewing history moderated the effects of TV viewing on food intake.
Methodology
Participants in this experiment ranged form age 3 to 5 years old. There were 24 subjects (12 boys and 12 girls). The Pennsylvania State University Institutional Review Board approved all study procedures, and mothers provided consent for their family’s participation before the study began. The students were tested in a lab and went there 2 days per week for 6 weeks in groups of 4 to 8 children. The children were giving 22 minutes to eat and watch a Disney cartoon while eating. The children were served pizza, unsweetened applesauce, baby carrots, and 2% milk. The food giving was calculated for the amount of grams and the amount of minerals it had. These sessions were videotaped.
Results
The results on children’s attention allocation during meals showed that children were fixated with the TV 93% of the time during lunch meals, and 96% of the time during snacks; thus, children were actively engaged with the TV program.
Discussion
The results of this study show that TV viewing can either increase or decrease preschool children’s food intakes. In the experimental sessions, the children who at home watch television while eating had more energy intake then the other subjects. Even though there are studies saying that there can be weight issues if you watch television while eating, the experiments didn’t show any weight being gained or lost. TV viewing reduced energy intake during meals and snacks for some children. For other children, particularly children who are accustomed to eating during TV viewing, TV viewing increased intake compared with the situation in which eating occurred in the absence of TV viewing.
Conclusions
In conclusion, the scientist hypothesis was right. Watching television does have an affect on energy intake when if you are eating and watching at the same time. Even tough it is only has a bad effect on some people, it is an major problem that a lot of kids watch television while eating food. Mothers reported that children watched an average of 1.5 hours of TV daily, and that 33% of children reportedly ate meals or snacks while watching TV. The children should get to spent as much time as they can with their family. The mothers should stop letting their children.
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Steve Mcloven | Mar 26, 2009 | Reply
I think children are getting fatter by the second these kids are lazy, not only that but think about it what workout are you getting sitting down acting like a baby Rhino?? These young Whipper snappers should even be glad they get food back in my day we wrestled it out the mouths of baby Koalas!!!