Abstract

ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to analyze television advertisements from different TV channels which are part of the Chilean National Television Association. During one week in January and one week in February of 2010 the advertisements were screened. The analysis selected and classified food's advertising as healthy, moderately healthy and unhealthy based on food's critic nutritional components: total fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates and sodium using as reference a classification chart called "Traffic Light System" and created by the UK Food Standard Agency. Sixty thousand four hundred and twenty five (6.425) advertisements were registered and analyzed accounting for 56 hours and 36 minutes in total. One thousand forty five (1.045) advertisements were identified as food advertisements (16%) accounting for 7 hours and 42 minutes (14%) of the total. Nutritional labels of the products were studied in order to classify and select them as described above. From the total offood advertisements it was observed that 64% were related to unhealthy food; 27% to moderately healthy and 9% to healthy food; accounting for respectively 62%, 30% and 8%, respectively, of the total time reported on food advertisement. Food advertisements are mostly unhealthy, promoting food consumption with high levels of fat, sugar and sodium. The broadcasting of this type of advertisements by television promotes the population to follow unhealthy life styles which result in a deterioration of their health.