According to a report published today from economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, banning fast food advertisements on television could reduce the number of overweight children in the United States by as much as 18%. However the team of researchers from Lehigh University, Georgia State University and City University of New York Graduate Center questioned the practicality of such an approach, which has been put into effect only by Sweden, Norway and Finland till now.

Economist Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania said, "We have known for some time that childhood obesity has gripped our culture, but little empirical research has been done that identifies television advertising as a possible cause. Hopefully, this line of research can lead to a serious discussion about the type of policies that can curb America's obesity epidemic."

The partially federally funded study is the largest of its kind to directly link childhood obesity to fast-food advertising, is published in the Journal of Law & Economics. In the study Chou and colleagues used data on nearly 13,000 children from the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, both issued by the U.S. Department of Labor. The researchers studied the TV viewing habits of the children taken from two national surveys in 1979 and 1997 and researchers measured the number of hours of fast-food advertising on television viewed by children on a weekly basis.

The researchers said, "The advertising measure used is the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week. Our results indicate that a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent." The researchers said they found that the percentage of overweight children ages 6 to 11 more than tripled between 1970 and 1999 (to 13%).  A ban on fast food advertising during the children’s programmes could reduce this number to 18 % in children ages 3 to 11 and by 14 % in adolescents ages 12 to 18.

According to estimates by The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13.9 % of children aged 2 to 5 are overweight, 18.8 % of those aged 6 to 11 are and more than 17 % of those 12 to 19. In 2006, the Institute of Medicine issued a report to say there is compelling evidence linking food advertising on television to the increase in child obesity.