Fast Food Ads - Would Banning Them Help Childhood Obesity?

I think more parents need to be like Dan.

Kids (and even adults) are easily influenced by commercials, but I also don't think banning fast food ads is going to prevent childhood obesity. Even if fast food ads were banned, that wouldn't stop advertisements for high-calorie sports drinks, over-sugared breakfast cereals, delivery pizza, desserts at sit-down family restaurants, etc. People need to learn how to take commercials with quite a bit of skepticism. Besides, how would they define "fast food"? American companies can be very innovative and creative. No matter how "fast food" is defined, all fast food companies need to do is repackage their products and/or rename their stores to no longer qualify as fast food under the definition. For example, Boston Market is already a branch of McDonald's. If McDonald's can't advertise, but Boston Market can, it'd probably just push more products (like the salads that have more salt, fat, and calories than Big Macs) on the Boston Market side. There is no way to define an effective ban that doesn't start to approach a blanket ad ban on all food commercials. Even if there's a blanket food ban, companies can still advertise movies, DVDs, and TV shows (like Baby Einstein and Veggie Tales) that convince children to sit inactively in front of a screen for hours on end, so the kids would probably still be obese unless all advertisements were banned. Considering that TV programs are often paid for by ad money, that would probably destroy TV programming too. While that in itself might not necessarily be a bad thing, it's probably going to hurt the economy.