An AP article reports on a new study, published in this month’s Pediatrics. The study found that teen girls who “frequently read magazine articles about dieting” five years ago, are two to three times more likely to use means such as fasting, laxatives, induced vomiting and cigarette smoking to lose weight, compared to girls who don’t read such articles as often.
It didn’t seem to matter whether the girls were overweight when they started reading about weight loss, nor whether they considered their weight important. After taking those factors into account, researchers still found reading articles about dieting predicted later unhealthy weight loss behavior.
44% of girls reported reading such articles, compared to 14% of boys. The study didn’t find any effects of the articles on boys.
There’s a sort of “duh!” response to articles like this – I mean, of course girls who read lots of articles about weight loss are more likely to be sticking fingers down their throats or fasting or whatever. What’s surprising to me is that no such effect was found among boys, since I’ve read several articles suggesting that boys are becoming more body-conscious and fat-phobic.
So here’s a thought: If we can ban trans fats in restaurants to protect health, can we also ban diet articles from teen girl magazines to protect health?
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I think if you took out what was unhealthy from magazines aimed at teenage girls there wouldn’t be a lot left.
Well there wouldn’t be anything left.
A good topic. What I read here, happened exactly with my daughter, when she was 17 years old, the dream to get a super-slim figur – this makes teenager girls ‘beautiful’ – she did it, despite my strong objection. Suddenly she could not eat anything anymore and spent 6 weeks in a hospital.
She thinks now a bit different about overweight and dieting…
If somebody tells you overweight is not good for your health, I can only reply that underweight is even dangerous for your life. Any dieting article should obligatory run an information, how dangerous underweight really is.
I think, boys care less about overweight than girls, it is not such a topic about how to become a ‘beautiful’ fashion model showing only skin and bones.
Overweight is maybe ‘ugly’, but I am not sure, if a stupid diet for showing skin and bones is beautiful and healthy.
My opinion out of my experience in my family: If your overweight gives you a bad feeling, try to do more sports, but do not restrict yourself too much with questionable diet – to lose rapidly weight or to be underweight is dangerous.
I have this feeling that there is a lot of self-selection going on among girls who read these articles. They read the articles because they already have an unhealthy fixation on weight and weight loss. I don’t know what the answer is. It is creepy and alarming that, as we weigh more than ever, forgetting about whether that in itself is a good or bad thing, we are obsessed more and more by an ideal that is basically inhuman and abnormal for all but a very few. Indeed, even among models and actresses who achieve the so-called ideal, eating disorders are common. Their “ideal” weight is not normal. I think it all goes back to the idea that, no matter how enlightened we try to be, girls are still not allowed to be who they are. They must be who we want them to be. This is a problem that can only be solved one girl and one parent at a time. Magazines are mostly feeding the demand, not creating it, except at the margins.
Just because boys had a lower percentage of them responding in this way doesn’t mean they’re not becoming more body-conscious–14% could still be higher than it would have been several years ago. Boys are making up higher percentages of victims of eating disorders than in the past, but they’re still significantly in the minority.
Sorry to be so off topic but… If Bush declares a troop increase onTues as widely expected we are calling for a coordinated response to this provacative and dangerous policy. Here in Montana we are organizing direct action to take place immediately upon hearing of any proposal for a “surge”. Please get involved in your area, this is the MOMENT we have been waiting for. Use the blogs to get the word out. Thanks.
Well, I did my best to ignore the articles, but instead the doctor got to me. When I was 16 I weighed 145 and a doctor told me I was morbidly obese and told me I had to lose weight and told me to start by cutting out fat and work from there. He told me that if I did not want to die young, I needed to weigh under 100 pounds (I was 5 foot tall, I have since gotten two inches taller) At the time I had the measurements of 42-28-38. I cut down what I ate, and cut and continued to eat less and less until I ended up in the emergency room I was only down to 135. I was not fat to begin with, if it were not for my breasts, I would have sunk like a stone in the pool, my legs certainly did. I was moderately active, and dieting at all merely made me lethargic, cranky, and sick.
Cutting out stupid diet articles won’t help until we change doctor’s attitudes too.
Barbara raises the important question. Was this an observational study, or was there random assignment (very unlikely), or some other method (e.g., matching) to at least try to reveal the underlying causal relationships? It may be that the articles adversely affected subsequent unhealthy behavior, but it’s equally possible that people who already were on a path to it self-selected for reading them. It’s even possible that reading the articles made kids LESS likely to engage in self-destructive behavior. We don’t know. Without commenting on the study, which I haven’t seen, the AP account is a perfect case of junk science journalism. Reader beware.
This was not a study to determine causation. 2,500 Minnesota teens were studied at 5 years with surveys, also being measured and weighed.
Guys probably are becoming more body-conscious and fat-phobic, but magazines for male teens are not at all like magazines for female teens. While many articles in girls magazines are about losing weight, I wonder if guys magazines address weight loss very often at all. It’s my crazy notion that guys are more focused on adding muscle, often increasing their weight, rather than losing weight per se. It’s unhealthy, for example, but steroid use isn’t going to be a weight-loss measure, although it may very well be used out of the same mental place of body-image issues.
I look forward to seeing more research on the subject. This appears to be data from a larger study, rather than a specific, narrowly-tailored one. So you end up with the researchers considering cigarette smoking as a “weight-loss measure”. I don’t think guys are as likely to rationalize smoking that way. Likewise, I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t significant gender-specific differences in the forms of weight control (purging, skipping meals, working out more) as well as in the goals.
“The study doesn’t say which magazines the teens read, or whether the weight loss articles promoted healthy or unhealthy dieting. ”
I don’t know if this comes from the AAP press release, but the assumption, also visible in the NYT article, with the Seventeen spokesman, is that the pr0blem would lie with articles on unhealthy behavior, as if all body-obsession stories aren’t promoting unhealthy behavior.
I have this feeling that there is a lot of self-selection going on among girls who read these articles. They read the articles because they already have an unhealthy fixation on weight and weight loss.
Actually, in my experience, this isn’t particularly true. I, and all the girls I knew, started reading teen magazines when we were 11 or 12 years old. We learned what it was like to be teenagers before we were teenagers, and we learned about it from TV, from movies, and from magazines. And believe me, we all read those magazines cover to cover. I’m sure we weren’t the only pre-teen girls to get our ideas about what was normal from those sources. When magazines told us, both explicitly and implicitly, that normal teenage girls spent most of the time they weren’t thinking about school or boys worrying about their weight, a lot of us listened.
I don’t know whether teen magazine dieting articles will prove to be a significant cause of unhealthy body image in teen girls, but if they do, I won’t be a bit surprised.
Boys don’t diet because a) this time period is a time period where boys are going through their adolescent growth spurt (which is already finished for girls) including a huge burst of testosterone, thus most boys are already fairly lean by the time they reach the appearance-concious stage, and b) boys want big muscles, and thus go a different way if they diet unhealthily (doing things like fad high-protein diets and such combined with lifting weights and other such “muscle-building” activities, usually done in ways that actually won’t build muscle because, thanks to the gutting of physical education programs, they don’t know anything about physical fitness or how to build muscle). This doesn’t get picked up by the statistics on eating disorders because it ends up causing other health issues — kidney problems, or joint disorders, or whatever — that don’t seem to have any connection to body image at first glance.
Oh, and as someone else noted, steroids are a major problem with teen boys. This can cause long-term liver problems, but never gets picked up as a “body image” problem. But it is, every bit as much as the anorexic eating disorder is. It just doesn’t get reported as such.
Really interesting points, Badtux. Do you have any recommended articles or empirical studies on this subject I could look up? (I’m not doubting you, I’m just interested in doing further reading.)
The same folks are writing a study on steroid use as well. Stay tuned..
Thanks again for the article.
Girly magazines are horrific, but so are most of the fashionable ones aimed at adults. There really isn’t much content to speak of in any of them.
It will be interesting, as blogging becomes more mainstream as media, if the effect of that sort of advertising drops off as time goes on, or if the diet/fashion advertisers will worm their way into there as well. Does anyone have any observations about a magazine-equivalent online?
Re. boys and eating disorders
My hunch is that, at the moment, young men are getting more of their body issues from each other, or from movies (i.e. the Gropinator crap) and pseudo-wrestling. Similar effects, just a different set of delivery vehicles for the poison.
I’m involved (as a fat woman) in power sports, and get to see a lot on both steroids and eating disorders. Both problems are RAMPANT in both genders of young people, and groups like ATLAS/ATHENA, NCADFA and USADA are very much making the connection about shared motivations between eating disorders (in thinner than average size people, at least) and other dangerous behaviors like doping or amphetamine use.
Most groups involving strength athletes are still egregiously pro-dieting/anti-fat, however, and don’t yet get that “weight loss” attempts involving calorie or food group restrictions are also eating disorders and at least as dangerous. The lack of condemnation of weight cutting or instigation of rule changes that would discourage the practice is especially disturbing (i.e. not announcing the cutoffs for weight classes until after athletes have weighed in, and doing real-time weight class assignments the day of the event with an eye to fair play and safety. Creating weight classes months beforehand gives athletes opportunity to take drastic, dangerous measures just to squeeze into the top of a lower weight class, and therefore have a weight advantage in the competition. Yes, it’s ironic as hell, but it’s one of the most frequent types of male eating disorders out there).
More work to do…
A lot of drug-free athletes are getting more than fed up with dopers walking around with world records, and “clean” (i.e. steroid/drug-free) amateur powerlifting competitions are around, but they have nowhere near the cachet or cash of the steroid-saturated pro versions. Literally, the only major steroid-free events are some (cough) college athletics and the Olympics. The WWF might as well just throw a couple of syringes into the ring for an hour once a week. And, all sports are saturated with weird food rituals and fat bashing (regardless of the ultimat effect on sports performance.)
I know a number of people who grew up reading teen girls’ magazines and wound up with unhealthy body images, and a number of people who grew up reading teen girls’ magazines and only wound up with cheap temporary crushes on television stars and a penchant for bad perfume. (To paraphrase Maia, if you took out the stupid, you’d have a magazine made up of margins and possibly a couple of Q&A columns about puberty and safe sex.)
The big difference in the people I know, and what happened with their body images in the long run, is whether they were getting this crap from their parents and doctors. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I’m inclined to believe the significance of this stuff. I watched my little sister being told by my mother (who now denies doing this) that she was fat and should diet — constantly — as a little child, and now she’s quite thin and has an image of herself as fat and ugly. No one else in my family developed this image problem, despite reading the same magazines. I think anyone who is raised with a sense of critical thinking can discard a certain amount of media trash. But when you hear it from someone you are taught to trust and love — it’s daggers in the heart.
kbrigan – how much more of a problem are steroids in high school athletics than when I was there (20 years ago)?
I agree that movies and WWE wrestling give a false impression to boys – even without doping, those people would have been working out constantly for a significant period of time, and are selected for muscular growth. Not to say that intensive or even casual training won’t help kids get into better shape, but not everyone can be Ahnold or Lex Luger.
Weight cutting definitely was a problem in wrestling – one boy in my AP Biology class cut down two weight classes (155 to 138) my senior year. He was constantly razzed by classmates about being “moody”, when he just was starving…..I don’t see how cutting weight for either wrestling, boxing, or weightlifting benefits an athlete – the small advantage of competing in a lower weight class is outweighed by having to train in a weakened state.
Hard to tell. This is from NIDA: http://www.drugabuse.gov/ResearchReports/Steroids/anabolicsteroids2.html#scope
“The 2005 Monitoring the Future study, a NIDA-funded survey of drug use among adolescents in middle and high schools across the United States, reported that past year use of steroids decreased significantly among 8th- and 10th-graders since peak use in 2000. Among 12th-graders, there was a different trend—from 2000 to 2004, past year steroid use increased, but in 2005 there was a significant decrease, from 2.5 percent to 1.5 percent.
Steroid abuse affects individuals of various ages. However, it is difficult to estimate the true prevalence of steroid abuse in the United States because many data sources that measure drug abuse do not include steroids. Scientific evidence indicates that anabolic steroid abuse among athletes may range between one and six percent.”
Also see articles at: http://www.ncadfa.org/facts/?view=&details=79