How The Media Contributes To Eating Disorders - How The Media Contributes To Eating Disorders?

Eating disorders are complex situation that arise from a variety of factors, including psychological, physical, interpersonal and social issues. Media images and icons that help to create cultural definitions of health beauty and attractiveness are often acknowledged as being among those factors contributing to eating disorders.

It has been proven that media can badly influence the beginning of eating disorders in some people. This is an obvious issue especially in children and teens who can easily be lulled into the wrong image of what the human body is supposed to look like. The most serious concern of eating disorder is that tiny little children as young as 8 year old are now contracting anorexia and the media are to blame. The images of slimness and unreal sexual images in the media do greatly influence children's minds which in turn lead them into an eating disorder.

Early exposure to attractive images encourage young people to see themselves as objects and value themselves for how they look rather then a whole person. The values of the children shift to the side where being beautiful and sexually attractive substitutes for being an individual with a strong sense of self. These conditions inevitably lead people especially the young women to pursue slenderness and artificial beauty that they see on the covers of magazines on TV and in the newspapers. Very often children have no ability of understanding that what they are pursuing is only an unattainable image provided by the media to entertain their readers, attract buyers and sell the products they advertise or to send some other frivolous messages to the public.

So the early stages of an eating disorder in young people can very often be connected to body dissatisfaction which is brought on by comparing their own body to the body images in the media. For instance a recent survey revealed that 25% of teenage girls would consider plastic surgery if they could and 2% already have had cosmetic surgery to change the way they look. The other research and studies were done on 4000 teenager girls aged from 11 to 18 and found that more than 85% of them were unhappy with their body stature and would like to do or are already doing something about it. The recent Botox survey showed that women as young as 17 years old do Botox injection in order to prevent wrinkles. All the other similar examples shows that a number of teenage people nowadays think that fake women are much better than the real thing, based on the images that are portrayed in the media as being the norm.

At the conclusion, it can be said that, the media contributes a lot to developing body dissatisfaction and consequently eating disorders, by promoting fake unattainable images of men's and women's bodies. To fight eating disorders it is essential to educate the teenage masses on the truth of how the media works to sell its advertising clients products. Young people should be taught about balance and the truth of what is perceived to be beautiful and what real women are suppose to look like.

• Felicia Byrnes
• 25/01/2009, 10:59 AM
• 0 Comments