Articles about the ways of losing weight have harmful effect on teenagers

Impressive magazines’ covers are full of headlines such as: “Obtain the figure of your dream”, “To get rid of the excessive weight is now easy!” However, those articles can become harmful when teenagers read them.

The new survey has shown that reading such kind of materials by teenager girls has bad influence on them in future. In 5 years, on average, they start practicing some extremely dangers ways of losing weight, such as taking laxatives, diuretics and forcing the vomiting reflex.

Such factors, as having excess of weight or perception of the significance of one’s own weight, were not important, even after taking these factors into the account the difference stayed considerable: after reading this material girls still remained more disposed to the dangerous behavior.

Girls, who studied in high schools, and read articles about diets, tried to lose weight with the help of smoking cigarettes two times more in comparison to those, who didn’t read the articles. In addition, they tried to lose weight with the help of taking purgatives or forcing vomiting tree times more.

Specialists from Harvard say that such articles should contain only specific and helpful information, instead of advancing a slogan: “You should be concerned about your excessive weight, do something”

The data was collected from wide-ranging survey held among students of high schools between the years of 1999 and 2004. About 45 % of the respondents were males. Only 14 % of them said that they read articles about diets. There were almost three times more females interested in such articles - approximately 44%

While analyzing the behaviors of boys, interested in the problem of being overweight, the researchers did not find any influence of the articles on their behavior. However, it was not clear what exactly influenced the behavior of girls. Many experts said that the text materials itself did not have strong impact on the young minds, it were the photo materials in glossy magazines, showing slim photo models, that had the biggest influence. The primary surveys has shown that watching of TV programs with participation of photo models changed the girls attitude to their own bodies immediately . Most of them lowered their self-appraisal and started seeking for defects of their bodies. At the same time the survey showed that most of the teenagers were disposed to the exaggeration of their weight and degree of obesity.

This survey became very urgent after the death of photo-model Anna Caroline Reston in November caused by malnutrition. Specialists suggest to all parents, and mothers particularly, that they need to watch after the literature, their daughters read. The literature that promotes the healthy way of life is undoubtedly important, however materials, that obtrusively offer teenagers to become more concerned about their weight, should be limited.