India Today – Shelly Anand
Whenever seven-year-old Karan Kapoor, already on the obese side, sees an advertisement for potato chips on TV, he slips into throwing a tantrum to have a packet of it. Struggling to handle Karan during such episodes, his mother has now banned all forms of junk food in the house. Like Karan, scores of children get drawn into unhealthy eating habits fuelled by what they see in commercials. As Minal Shah, senior nutrition therapist at Fortis Hospital in Mulund (Mumbai), explains: “Advertising directed at young children is by its very nature exploitative. Children have a remarkable ability to recall content from ads they have been exposed to. Product preference has been shown to occur with as little as a single commercial exposure, and been found to strengthen with repeated exposure.”