Television commercials and eating behavior of obese and normal-weight women

Abstract

Without prior knowledge of the purpose of the study, volunteer adolescent and adult female subjects representing obese and normal-weight categories watched a television program that incorporated either food commercials (high-cue) or nonfood commercials (low-cue). During the viewing, subjects had access to a container of small cookies. The provision of a light lunch to all participants minimized differences in preexperiment hunger. As a control for differences in tendency to eat cookies, each subject, prior to television exposure, had access to the cookies in the absence of food-related cues. The number of cookies consumed by each subject under the no-cue and the experimental conditions were counted. Analysis of covariance, with cookie consumption in the no-cue situation as the covariate, revealed that obese subjects ate significantly more cookies than normal-weight subjects when exposed to the high-cue, but not to the low-cue, condition. These data suggest that under some conditions television food commercials stimulate eating in obese subjects.