Forget Transfats! Step Away from that Copy of Seventeen Magazine!

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) wants legislation to ban "junk food" advertising to children. To wit:

"A serious approach to childhood obesity would not allow corporations to appeal directly to children and convince them to eat foods that harm their health—period," said CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson.

Now the Washington Post reports a new study that finds that "reading articles about diet and weight loss could have unhealthy consequences later."

The article continues:

Teenage girls who frequently read magazine articles about dieting were more likely five years later to practice extreme weight-loss measures such as vomiting than girls who never read such articles, the University of Minnesota study found.

It didn't seem to matter whether the girls were overweight when they started reading about weight loss, nor whether they considered their weight important. After taking those factors into account, researchers still found reading articles about dieting predicted later unhealthy weight loss behavior.

Get it? Advertising makes you fat; diet information makes you anorexic. Kind of a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situation. It won't be long before the food and nutrition busybodies conclude that since information is toxic that we need to suspend the First Amendment. Of course, they'll do it "for the children."