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

ARTICLE IN PRESS 392

Abstracts / Appetite 47 (2006) 384–401

Perceived parenting behaviors may predict young adolescents’ body fatness. MI JEONG KIMa, ALEX MCINTOSHb, KAREN

S. KUBENAc, JENNA ANDINGd, DEBRA REEDe. aTexas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. bDepartment of Sociology, Texas A&M University, USA. cDepartment of Nutrition and Food Science, Texas A&M, USA. dTexas Cooperative Extension, Texas A&M, USA. eDepartment of Nutrition, Hospitality, and Retailing, Texas Tech University, USA. [email protected] The prevalence of overweight among children and adolescents has been increasing. Not only individual but also environmental factors are important in the etiology of overweight or obesity. Of the environmental factors, parents have been considered to be the greatest influence on a child’s dietary behavior and body weight status. Parenting styles and their relevant dimensions have long been found to be associated with adolescents’ developmental outcomes, but little is known about associations between perceived parenting behaviors and adolescents’ body fatness. The present study examined adolescents’ perceptions of parenting behaviors and measures of body fatness. The randomly selected study sample consisted of 106 13–15 year olds from Houston MSA. Parenting style variables were created statistically including by cluster analysis and factor analysis. Indicators of body fatness included body weight, waist circumference, skinfold thickness and body mass index (BMI). A two-cluster solution for both maternal and paternal parenting style represented authoritative versus nonauthoritative parenting. Two parenting factors derived were maternal/paternal nurturing and control. Maternal authoritative parenting style was associated with having adolescents who are less fat. Maternal control was positively associated with adolescents’ body weight, waist, subscapular skinfold, BMI and the tendency to be overweight. Maternal nurturing was related to BMI in the ‘‘normal’’ category. None of paternal parenting styles or dimensions appeared to be significantly related to adolescents’ body fatness. 10.1016/j.appet.2006.08.029

Notions of place in low-carbohydrate diet discourse: Dieters’ accounts. CHRISTINE KNIGHT. CSIRO Human Nutrition,

University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia. [email protected] A qualitative study of low-carbohydrate and low-Glycemic Index (low-GI) dieters was carried out in Adelaide, South Australia, in early 2006. Twenty men and women who had used, or were currently on, a diet such as Atkins, South Beach, Protein Power, or New Glucose Revolution (an Australian low-GI diet bestseller) were given individual semi-structured interviews. As well as dieters’ experiences of using a low-carbohydrate or low-GI diet, interviews focused on

dieters’ reasons for choosing a ‘controlled-carbohydrate diet’, and the explanations dieters provided for the various health effects they experienced. This study builds on my ongoing research into the discourse of low-carbohydrate dieting via analysis of low-carbohydrate diet books, in which notions of place are very important. The low-carbohydrate diet literature demonstrates a strong nostalgia for origins, a concept which incorporates both temporal and geographic dimensions. Low-carbohydrate authors suggest that we are nutritionally ‘lost’ as a society and as individuals. The object of the dieter’s quest is to regain an authentic, healthy self which can be located via an (imagined) return to other times and other places, particularly more ‘traditional’ Mediterranean and non-Western societies. This study examines the significance of utopian spaces in contemporary popular nutrition, with particular reference to how dieters themselves conceptualize social and cultural spaces in relation to food and nutrition. 10.1016/j.appet.2006.08.030

Healthy cartoons? The nutritional implications of digital video recorders on children’s television. JEREMY L. KORR.

Department of Social Sciences, Chapman University, Victorville, CA 92395, USA. [email protected] 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 nonprime-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. 10.1016/j.appet.2006.08.031