Researchers suggest advertising media may adversely impact women's body image,

ads made women fear being unattractive

he average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day

and by the time she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media.

Only 9% of commercials have a direct statement about beauty,

but many more implicitly emphasize the importance of beauty--particularly those that target women and girls.

This constant exposure to female-oriented advertisements may influence girls to become self-conscious about their bodies and to obsess over their physical appearance as a measure of their worth

ty, and the bodies idealized in the media are frequently atypical of normal, healthy women. In fact,

Advertisements emphasize thinness as a standard for female beau

today's fashion models weigh 23% less than the average female

Women frequently compare their bodies to those they see around them, and researchers have found that exposure to idealized body images lowers women's satisfaction with their own attractiveness.

girls reported in a

Body Image Survey that "very thin" models made them

feel insecure about themselves.

Dissatisfaction with their bodies causes many women and girls to strive for the thin ideal. The number one wish for girls ages 11 to 17 is to be thinner

Eighty percent (80%) of 10-year-old girls have dieted,

One study found that 47% of the girls were influenced by magazine pictures to want to lose weight, but only 29% were actually overweight

Research has also found that stringent dieting to achieve an ideal figure can play a key role in triggering eating disorders.

Girls who were already dissatisfied with their bodies showed more dieting, anxiety, and bulimic symptoms after prolonged exposure to fashion and advertising images

in a teen girl magazine.

It will affect websites, fashion houses, magazines and advertisers.

those found to have encouraged severe weight loss could be fined up to 45,000 euros and face three years in prison.

"Encouraging young girls to lie to their doctors, advising them on foods that are easier to regurgitate and inciting them to beat themselves up each time they eat is not freedom of expression," Ms Bachelot told the assembly.

It is necessary because we know now that we have a risk to some part of the population, young girls, who are pressed by different types of lobbies and the risk is increasing."

he law could also affect the fashion industry and magazine editors who publish photographs of extremely thin models.

Page last updated at 21:43 GMT, Tuesday, 15 April 2008 22:43 UK E-mail this to a friend Printable version

he BBC's Emma Jane Kirby in Paris says that with 40,000 anorexics in France, many parliamentarians feel the law cannot come soon enough.

The media reinforces this standard by promoting dolls like barbies which no girl or woman could ever seriously look like.

he proportions are all wrong and the measurements when converted to full size are freakishly absurd.

Girls and teenagers are self conscious enough about their body image without being bombarded with air brushed perfection which sometimes borders on looking cartoon like with their lack of blemishes and freckles.

Young girls are starting to diet at younger ages and exposure from the media promoting beauty contests doesn't help this.

There has been some progress on the promotion of ultra thin models and in some place they've been banned.

Women are portrayed as perfect models. Although very often "Photoshop-edited",

hile stressing the importance of being slim. This leads in consequence to "promotion of anorexia", which is clearly undesirable.

Many girls idolize models and feel the need to mirror their thinness.

Models of a very low weight are setting bad examples to these girls

can be held responsible for the increasing number of girls with eating disorders

The fashion industry is not to blame for eating disorders. Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses and are not simply triggered by models and images of thin people.

accept that extreme thinness is anorexia.

norexia is the desire to maintain a lower body weight than is normal and healthy.

If a little girl sees a variety of thin/anorexic celebrities on TV, in magazines, decides with her friends that they are beautiful, that she'd like to look like them and, in an attempt to do so, she proceeds to lose 20 kilos, she's anorexic!

The danger is that the numbers of women who have uncomfortable thoughts about their bodies are far, far higher than those suffering from full blown anorexia

once these thoughts have first sprung into existence, all they need is a little nourishment to make them sprout roots...and grow.

First into a diet, often into an eating disorder such as anorexia.

she just feels inadequate and guilty because she can't bring herself to starve her body to the same extent as the models and celebrities do.

it's impossible to find a magazine without at least one spread on some amazing diet and exercise regime, always with the implicit message that we are 'wrong/lazy' if we don't follow it.

not only does media influence on anorexia exist, anorexia is deliberately being perpetuated by the media and the mixed messages it portrays

he media, especially ads and commercials for appearance-related items, suggest that we can avoid the hard character work by making our bodies into copies of the icons of success.

ads reveals a not-so-subtle message ? ‘You are not acceptable the way you are. The only way you can become acceptable is to buy our product and try to look like our model, who is six feet tall and wears size four jeans - and is probably anorexic’

To underestimate media influence on anorexia is to underestimate the power it has to influence the self esteem of us all.

while thin women and pumped-up men are the successful, popular, sexy and powerful ones. How can we tell our children that it's what's inside that counts, when the media continuously contradicts this message?

Super models in all the popular magazines have continued to get thinner and thinner.

Modeling agencies have been reported to actively pursue Anorexic models.

he average woman model weighs up to 25% less

han the typical woman and maintains a weight at about 15 to 20 percent below what is considered healthy for her age and height.

By far, these body types and images are not the norm and unobtainable

Diet advertisements are another problem.

hese images are fake.

the ideal body" combined with the diet industry's drive to make more money, creates a never-ending cycle of ad upon ad that try to convince us

Pop-culture's imposed definition of

Barbie-type dolls have often been blamed on playing a role in the development of body-image problems and Eating Disorders.

Not only do these dolls have fictionally proportioned, small body sizes, but they lean towards escalating the belief that materialistic possessions, beauty and thinness equate happiness.

Barbie has more accessories available to purchase than can be believed, including Ken, her attractive boyfriend.

personally do NOT believe every girl that has a Barbie-type doll is at risk of disordered eating,

The latest example of this trend, is the recent come-back of Britney Spears- after she'd given birth to two children, she was ridiculed for wearing a skimpier outfit, due to being "fat." The problem is, although she'd had two children, she was far from fat- yet the media criticized her for daring to show her "less than perfect" body on national television. With issues like this, it's no wonder that children and teenagers are being bombarded with messages of what perfection is and how to "be" perfect.

`I have certainly seen plenty of 11 and 12-year-olds kids in grade 6 and 7 with an eating disorder

Women of ages eleven years of age to seventeen years old number one wish is to lose weight and keep it off.

By the time these girls reach the age of eighteen eighty percent of them have dieted.

with young women

This is not only a problem

The advertisement for this product displays a thin, beautiful model dressed in a short, low-cut dress lounging on a bar stool. They have her long thin legs that take up most of the page with not a trace of cellulite on them. The caption for this advertisement is written across her tiny waist and it reads "Everybody could use a little less fat"

Lite Cheese portrays that a women cannot be thin enough an even every women who is thin must worry that their bodies are "too fat".

The ideal thin appears in television and magazines especially for women.

standard in television is slimmer for female then it is for males.

Popular women's magazines contain approximately ten times as many dieting articles

These students will gain weight and then diet. This triggers eating disorders

Suddenly they are on their own with food, usually for the first time in their lives

Approximately 95% of those affected by anorexia are female, but males can develop the disorder as well.

anorexia typically begins to manifest itself during early adolescence

In the U.S. and other countries with high economic status, it is estimated that about one out of every 100 adolescent girls has the disorder.

According to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), an estimated 0.5%-3.7% of women will suffer from this disorder at some point in their lives.

ny experts consider people for whom thinness is especially desirable, or a professional requirement (such as

models, dancers, and actors

At this time, no definite cause of anorexia nervosa has been determined. However, research within the medical and psychological fields continues to explore possible causes.