Sandi Kaplan, MS, RD, Associate Director, Clinical Development & Support:

An interesting study published in this month’s Journal of the American Dietetic Association caught my eye. Researchers taped 28 days of prime-time television as well as Saturday-morning programming on the four major broadcast networks. They identified 800 foods promoted in 3,000 ads and used a nutritional software program to analyze the content of the items.

If you were to eat 2,000 calories per day of the foods most prominently advertised, you would be consuming too much salt, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sugar. Your diet would also be low in fiber as well as in a number of important vitamins and minerals like iron, calcium, and vitamins A, D, and E. Considering the appeal of these advertised foods, it would be easy to eat much more than 2,000 calories worth in a given day, meaning these unhealthy elements of your diet could potentially be even higher.

According to a recent article, if Americans ate only foods advertised on TV they would consume 25 times the recommended amount of sugar and 20 times the amount of fat they need, but less than half the dairy, fiber and fruits and vegetables.

Why did this study hit home for me personally? Well, we are a big baseball family and that means that our TV watching time goes up significantly during baseball season. My husband and I can easily sit more than we need to at this time of year. I am not concerned about the kids’ physical activity going down due to their TV watching. They typically are out playing baseball for longer than they are watching. And our five-year-old likes to use a bottle brush as his “baseball bat” while he stands in front of the TV and helps the MLB players with their batting and pitching!

However, there are so many unhealthy food commercials during the games. The research shows that we are more likely to want to eat the foods we see on commercials and I have noticed the kids asking for chips or French fries more often.

Imagine if we could have as many fruit and vegetable commercials as we do fast food commercials. I think it would be extremely powerful for our public health if TV was used as a way to increase cravings for healthy foods by making them look as delicious as the greasy burgers are made to look. It’s certainly easier to make fresh strawberries, peaches, or a yummy stir fry look delectable!

So I have been trying a little experiment. I have been muting the commercials and the family jumps up to do something fun instead. We bounce on the bed (all right, that might not go over well in your house but we do allow bed bouncing!), we do a team cheer (Go Mariners!) or we see who can do the most jumping jacks before the game comes back on.

It’s only been a few days but the experiment is working. We are moving, laughing and ignoring the commercials. Until the healthy stuff is featured on TV, we are going to work on not modeling our diets on what we see on the screen. Give it a try – we can be in this together!