'Marked link' found between eating disorders and TV

There is a significant link between television and symptoms of eating disorders in young girls, researchers have discovered.

A report from the Harvard Medical School, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry today, found a marked increase in problems among adolescents exposed to television for the first time.

Dr Anne Becker conducted her research in Fiji, a nation relatively naïve about the media and noted for traditionally encouraging good appetites and larger body shapes. She found that within just three years, almost three-quarters of the study's subjects now felt themselves to be "too big or fat".

The study, the journal said, represents the first known investigation of television's impact on disordered eating in a small-scale indigenous society undergoing rapid change.

Researchers looked at the effect of the recent introduction of Western television among teenage girls in Nadroga.

They found that Western media imagery appears to have had a profoundly negative impact on body image and eating disorder behaviour among the girls. The researchers, led by Dr Becker, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, interviewed and tested two sets of Fijian schoolgirls within a few weeks of the introduction of TV to the area in 1995, and then again in 1998.

The study found the percentage of girls who said that they induced themselves to vomit to control their weight was zero in 1995. By 1998 it had reached 11.3 per cent.

Subjects living in a house with a television set were three times more likely to show symptoms of eating disorders.

By 1998 dieting had become common among the studied group with 69 per cent stating they had dieted to lose weight at some time and 74 per cent reporting they felt "too big or fat" on occasion. The girls also admitted, in interview, that they admired the fictional characters and tried to copy them.

The authors of the report conceded that it was possible the Fijian girls were particularly vulnerable to developing eating disorder behaviour from exposure to television, given the difference between ethnic body shapes and media images.

It is also possible, the researchers said, that they link the slender bodies of people on screen with other status symbols such as expensive clothes and careers due to a lack of awareness that these images are contrived and edited.

However, the authors stated that "the impact of television appears especially profound, given the longstanding cultural traditions that previously had appeared protective against dieting, purging and body- dissatisfaction in Fiji".

This is not the first time that television – and the media in general – has been accused of promoting overly thin images of women.

Calista Flockhart, the actress who plays the eponymous neurotic lawyer in Ally McBeal, was rumoured to be suffering from an eating disorder when she appeared to weigh little more than six and a half stone at the 1999 Emmy Awards. The actress denied she was suffering from anorexia but the show subsequently came under fire for presenting poor role models for young women. The show was again criticised when Flockhart's co-star, Portia De Rossi, appeared to lose a dramatic amount of weight.

Courteney Cox, Monica in the US sitcom Friends, has also denied suffering from bulimia, insisting she simply has a fast metabolism.

Previous attempts to establish a link between media exposure and eating disorders have been limited because in the developed world such imagery and illnesses are widespread. The Harvard Medical School researchers called for further research to understand how Western media and television-viewing may act as catalysts for other social and mental health problems.