These harmful messages get transmitted to children unintentionally, and may result in body image disturbances.
Body image can be defined as how we feel about our bodies and appearance, a mental picture of the size, shape and form of our body. It also describes our feelings about these physical characteristics.
Body image dissatisfaction has become a cultural norm for girls and women. Food advertisements create and reflect this norm by depicting women as obsessed and dissatisfied with their body weight, size, and shape. One of the primary roles for women in food advertisements is to show or express grief regarding some aspect of their appearance. The use of fashion models and celebrities to play this role only intensifies the underlying message in the advertisement, that if thin, beautiful, fashion models and television personalities are dissatisfied with their weight, ordinary women must be twice as concerned.
In their efforts to sell products, food advertisers routinely use strategies such as normalizing body dissatisfaction and weight preoccupation among women, set up unfavorable comparisons between women=s own bodies and the thin ideal, evoking guilt and shame about women=s appetites and body size, and inciting fear and anxiety about the potential consequences of unrestrained eating.
In many television advertisements, thin and "beautiful" models grace the screen and sell beauty products. In these commercials beauty is being equated with being thin and flawless. These advertisements portray women who have a weight that is below average, and have no imperfections. It is virtually impossible to attain this look, but the women watching these advertisements don't realize this. The more that a person is exposed to these ads, the greater their desire to be thin becomes. The average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day, and by the time she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media.