All that glitters is not healthy

December 10, 2007 05:54 PM EST

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All that glitters is not healthy So you’re in the supermarket stocking up on supplies for your new weight loss effort. Into the cart go carrots, low fat yogurt, a couple of Lean Cuisines. You get to the check out and pick up a few fashion magazines for motivation. You know they’re kind of junky but the magazines are likely to include a few diet tips and pictures of clothes you hope to fit into—and besides, they’re not fattening, so what harm could they do? Turns out, if you live with a pre-teen or teenaged girl, plenty. It is a paradox of modern life that while women are close to achieving equality in the workplace (and a woman is making a serious run for the American presidency), adolescent girls have never been more tyrannized by images of how they “should” look. In a chilling passage from her 1998 book The Body Project: An Intimate Portrait of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg notes that 100 years ago girls confided to their diaries aspirations to be better and kinder people while today “Dear Diary” is likely to contain confessions of dietary “cheating” and hopes of being as thin as a model. Exposing girls to magazines with diet articles may actually harm their health. Earlier this year, a study in the journal Pediatrics showed that 44% of middle school aged girls said they often read magazine articles about dieting. Five years later, the girls were surveyed again. Those who read about dieting were three times as likely as others to use vomiting or laxatives for weight control. They were twice as likely to smoke or fast to lose weight.

It's not just that girls who were particularly concerned about their body image or losing weight read the articles, according to the study. It was the frequent reading of the magazine articles that increased the risk. The authors saw this as further proof of just how much the media influence adolescents, especially girls.

If you are the parent of an adolescent girl, you might consider:

· Limiting your daughter's exposure to magazine articles about dieting and weight loss. As tempted as you might be to read about the latest great thing, leave the magazine in the store. Toss, or keep at your bedside, the magazines already in your house with weight loss articles in them. If your doctor or dentist has them in the waiting room, ask the staff to remove them.

· Teach your daughter media literacy. This is even more important, because you will never be able to protect her from all the media messages telling her she needs to be really thin and should do dramatic things to get that way. Talk about those messages together, and about why they can be bad for her health. Help her look critically at pictures of really thin models; talk about beauty as being healthy and happy, not skinny. Point out that the images are airbrushed and otherwise manipulated. Help her understand that there is way more to her than how she looks.

The Bottom Line

Obesity is increasing among our children and teens and we do need to help them to think about their eating and exercise habits. A good place to cut “empty calories” is to avoid the glossy images and glib words glorifying unobtainable thinness in magazines.

What affects do the media have on your body image?

Dr. Suzanne Koven practices internal medicine with a special interest in weight issues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and teaches at Harvard Medical School.

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