Stuffing and Starving: Are Cycles of Advertising Contributing to the Rise and Rise of Eating Disorders?

As the Victoria Beckhams of this world have replaced the Marilyn Monroes on the centerfolds of magazines and advertisements selling everything from perfume to real estate, wide social effects have taken place in rich nations. Although size zeros are no heroes, adolescent girls and grown women the world over have succumb to chasing the promised good feel of the thinness ideal. At the extreme, this chase can lead to conditions diagnosed by mental health professionals as binge eating and disordered eating (which includes self-starvation, bingeing, purging and exercising obsessively), leading to more widely known conditions of anorexia (self starvation) and bulimia (regular self-induced cycles of binge-eating and vomiting), found to affect up to 5.7% and 7.3% of women in Western nations respectively (1). Both are addictive psychological attempts to take back control over inputs into the body and sometimes other aspects of life. And both are on the rise in less wealthy countries too as they transition into Western lifestyles brought to them through cultural and corporate marketing transmissions associated with the age of globalisation (2). The speed with which this can occur is staggering. A now famous study by Harvard University (3), for example, discovered that within just three years of the introduction of Western television to the island of Fiji, a nation that previously cherished a fuller figure as a sign of health and beauty, 75% of girls reported feeling they were ‘too fat’ and, whereas previously eating disorders were virtually non-existent in the country, 15% of participants reported having vomited in order to control their food intake.

These links between the cultural transition to idealising skinny models and the rise of eating disorders in the global North and increasingly the global South are no secret. Yet, although majority of sufferers of these are women, male cases are rising and are estimated of being up to 2.1% of Western male populations (4 & 5). The most memorable and public case in the UK being the (ex)politician John Prescot. So are there also more subtle mechanisms at work destabilising eating patterns of both women and men worldwide? Ones related not just to the message itself, but to the annual cycle of food and drink advertising many of us are exposed to? Take Great Britain for instance:

October through January chocolate, indulgences, cakes, processed party foods and copious amounts of alcohol are advertised relentlessly to coincide with Christmas and other religious festivities. “You should relax”, “treat yourself, its the holidays”, “tis the season to be jolly” are messages streaming into our consciousness through all advertising mediums. These work through the reinforcement of existing norms of seasonal indulgence and by imposing new ones, so collective gorging begins.

From the 1st of January the tune changes as companies rush in to cash in on the tradition of New Year’s Resolution. By March, the widespread January push to detox after the Christmas binge overlaps with the thoughts of up-coming summer holidays, being advertised with bronzed, perfectly slender beach bodies. This builds on existing cultural values of what sociologists call the ‘thinness ideal’: “you should think about that waste-line”, “can you fit into your jeans?”, “would you really want to look like that in a bikini?”. Detox pills, magic shakes, diet books, videos and clubs, gym memberships and even losing weight through hypnotherapy compete for the purse strings, whilst people go into a “must lose weight” spending overdrive on dieting and forcing upon themselves more erratic eating patterns.

A glitch is caused by chocolate-mania around Easter time, but mainly this is aimed at children.

By September and October, once vacationers have returned from their summer holidays and settled back into their desk jobs and sedentary lifestyles, the pattern of individual stuffing and starving starts again.

This annual cycle of food and drink advertising creates a yo-yo-ing effect of putting on and losing weight, producing whole nations of bipolar eaters. Is it any wonder that the resultant loss of control over eating habits has psychological effects manifested in psycho-physiological disorders? I am of course talking primarily from a British media perspective, and a personal observation at that, but I would hazard a guess that similar patterns can be seen around the world in developed and middle-income economies. This is likely to be especially the case in Latin America and other countries where television is dominated by imported channels and programming, mainly from the US and UK. The likelihood is further increased in countries where national production is dominated by primary agricultural commodities, meaning that the high value-added, processed finished products of alcohol, sugary fizzy drinks, packaged foods, chocolate, crisps and even ready-made tortillas are imported by the same Western companies driving the advertising in their home countries and abroad.

Finally, our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with food on a psychological and physiological level is also manifest in the global epidemic of overweightness and obesity. It is predicted to rise to 1.5bn people worldwide by 2020, and, as I have previously argued, it too has undeniable connections to the global food industry and its advertising messages*. Researchers are seeing obesity and other socially negative effects such as environmental damage as costs externalized in the normal profit-seeking goals and activities of transnational corporations (TNCs) (6). Costs which are inevitably picked up by individuals and tax-payer funded national public health services. Disordered eating is no different and, as in the case of Fiji, can result almost entirely from environments created and messages streamed by companies and their media tools. Changing how human beings see and feel about themselves is a well established negative effect of marketing the Western ‘thinness ideal’ (7), yet other factors are overlooked. Therefore, recognising that food related eating disorders are possibly linked to the annual cycles of food and drink advertising (8) of the global food economy in which Jenny Craig (a leading US weight-loss company) is owned by Nestle (the world’s biggest food and beverage company and owners of brands like Kit-Kat), is like the first step of any addiction recovery programme – it is admitting that we have a problem. It is only at this point that we can search for viable public policy interventions (9).

Do you think that advertising plays in role in the rise of eating disorders? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Notes:

* It is crucial to note that psychological and biological factors are very important in the development of any type of food related mental health disorder and it is not my intention to negate these, rather to highlight the social and media dimensions which can be neglected in the debate.

1. Makino M., Tsuboi K. & Dennerstein L. (2004) “Prevalence of Eating Disorders: A Comparison of Western and Non-Western Countries”, MedGenMed, Vol. 6, No. 3: pp. 49-.

2. Ibid.

3. Becker A., Burwell R. A. Gilman SE, Herzog DB, Hamburg P. (2002) “Eating behaviours and attitudes following prolonged exposure to television among ethnic Fijian adolescent girls”, British Journal of Psychiatry, No. 180, pp. 509-1.

4. www.disordered-eating.co.uk

5. These figures, of course, are likely to be grossly under-estimated due to the shame and embarrassment associated with admitting the problem to loved-ones and relatives.

6. Sobal J. & McIntosh W. M. (2009) “Globalization and Obesity,” in Inglis D. & Gimlin (Berg) D. (eds.), The Globalization of Food, pp. 255-272.

7. On the other end of the problem, weight loss is no longer purely a personal goal but a highly profitable multibillion dollar a year global industry and its links to disordered eating have began to be recognised by sociologists. As one paper put it “there is a lucrative market associated with Eating Disorders, and the advertising, weight-loss, diet-food, fitness, and cosmetic surgery industries are well aware of it”,
Hesse-Biber, S., Leavy P., Quinn E. C. & Zoino J. (2006) “The mass marketing of disordered eating and Eating Disorders: The social psychology of women, thinness and culture”, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 29, pp. 208-224

8. I have searched extensively for any psychological or sociological research that has tried to document the links between the cycle of advertising and prevalence of disordered eating, but have thus far not found it to have been a question addressed by the research community. It is a subject worthy of a more scientific enquiry and if any readers are aware of studies in the area I would be grateful to hear from you: developmentroast@inesad.edu.bo

9. Others, like this article by Luisiana State University, are also calling for more investigation into the causes of and links to the globalisation of eating disorders.

 

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