Healthy cartoons? The nutritional implications of digital video recorders on children's television

Abstract

Research over several decades has established definitively that children's television consumption has negative nutritional consequences for its young viewers. However, nearly all studies in this area have focused either on the advertisements interspersed with children's programs or on the overall act of television viewing. The few studies that have looked directly at the content of children's programs themselves with respect to nutrition were limited to prime-time programming. As a result, the question remains whether children's television programs themselves carry negative nutritional implications, or whether the problems appear exclusively in the advertisements and the general act of watching television. This distinction becomes important in light of the growth of digital video recorder (DVR) usage. DVRs enable viewers to record programs for future playback, with the additional capability of easily skipping past the advertisements. Although many children will certainly continue to watch television unimpeded by DVRs, the availability of the new technology has introduced the option for guardians to pre-record programs, and to show those programs without the advertisements. If the nutritional problems of children's programming do in fact reside primarily in the advertisements, DVRs could theoretically decrease the harmful consequences of children's television programming. A preliminary content analysis of non-prime-time children's television programming evaluated the extent to which the actual content presents negative (or positive) nutritional messages. The implications of the findings form the basis of recommendations for additional research.