The Media Causes Eating Disorders

According to the National Eating Disorder Association the media has a major influence on what a woman’s body should look like. Every print and television advertisement suggests that the ideal body is extremely thin. However, most women cannot achieve having a super-thin body that the media favors. The resulting failure leads to negative feelings about one’s self and can begin a downward spiral toward an eating disorder (National Eating Disorders Association).

A particularly disturbing fact is that research has demonstrated that children as young as five years of age are experiencing body image related anxiety. At the same time there has been a major increase in Internet websites that are devoted not only to dieting, but support groups for people with eating disorders. These websites are encouraging people who are at risk for eating disorders to start starving themselves or purging (Andrist, 2003).

Andrist’s article is quite credible. Linda has a RN from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, A BSN from University of Maryland, An MS in Nursing from Russell Sage College, A WHNP from University of Colorado, And a PhD in Sociology from Brandeis University. She currently teaches women and body image courses at MGH Institute of Health Professions and has received the Institute’s Nancy Watts Excellence in Teaching award in 2007. The award and the vast amount of education that Linda has, plus her 25 years of teaching experience, contributes to her credibility. The article was very informative and took a look at many effects that the media has on adolescents.

The media focuses mainly on an ideal image of the body. The media targets teens through magazines. Some of the messages the magazines give...

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...The references used in this book helped me to analyze how much I thought the book would be able to contribute to this paper. It provided such a vast amount of information that I had to be very picky about what I included in this paper, and that’s only from one chapter.

Works Cited

Andrist, Linda C. "Media Images, Body Dissatisfaction, and Disordered Eating in Adolescent Women." Adolescent Health Mar. 2003, 28th ed., sec. 2: 119-23. Print.

Smolak, Linda, Michael P. Levine, and Ruth Striegel-Moore. "Media as Context." The Developmental Psychopathology of Eating Disorders: Implications for Research, Prevention, and Treatment. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1996. 235-53. Print.

Strasburger, Victor C., Amy B. Jordan, and Ed Donnerstein. "Health Effects of Media on Children and Adolescents." Pediatrics 125.4 (2010): 756-67. Ebsco. Web. 26 Jan. 2011.