Blame it on the media!

Billboards, magazine covers and music videos constantly bombard today’s young women with images of unrealistically thin, female figures. It is not surprising that America’s diet and fitness market is booming and reality television shows that involve makeovers, weight loss and searches for models are watched by thousands of female viewers.

There is undoubtedly a connection between the media’s portrayal of super-slender models as the ideal, and women’s sometimes unhealthy obsession with dieting and weight loss. But blaming the media for causing dangerous eating disorders in teenage girls ignores the biological and chemical origins of the disease.

Anorexia nervosa is a disease characterized by self-starvation and an obsessive preoccupation with losing weight. Bulimia nervosa involves the binging and purging of food through laxatives and self-induced vomiting. To say these serious eating disorders are caused simply by advertisements in magazines and on television is an insult to those suffering from the diseases. According to the Discovery Health channel’s website, Anorexia is a rare disease affecting less than 1% of adolescent girls, but it has the highest mortality rate among psychiatric disorders. Bulimia ravages the system of 2-3% of girls, causing numerous health problems such as poor nutrition, gum damage, depression and sometimes heart problems. These illnesses can have numerous causes, possibly including, but not limited to, biological predispositions, hormonal imbalances, socio-cultural pressures and psychological traumas.

Whatever causes these diseases, eating disorders are not always about food as much as they are about a person in need of control or approval. Girls who have psychological problems and develop eating disorders may feel that limiting food intake is the only way to control any aspect of their lives. It isn’t always about feeling beautiful and looking like models; it is sometimes about empowering themselves in the only way they feel they can.
Young women who receive constant criticism from family members about their weight may also develop eating disorders because of low self-esteem, not strictly because they have too many fashion magazines cluttering their rooms. There is usually much more involved in causing the diseases to develop.

There must be something different about a girl who actually develops an eating disorder, versus a girl who reads the same magazines and watches the same television shows and does not develop the same disease. Since such a small percentage of teens exposed to the media develop eating disorders, the media cannot be blamed exclusively for those who do develop the diseases.
There are no medical tests to diagnose anorexia, bulimia or other eating disorders, but many doctors agree that there may be biological causes. This theory is supported by the success some patients have had when using antidepressants to recover from bulimia, according to the New York Times. However, Researchers found that the same antidepressants were not effective in treating patients for anorexia nervosa.
Some researchers believe that eating disorders result from a complex interplay of biological, chemical, and social factors. For example, social pressures, such as the media’s emphasis on thin women, may help trigger an eating disorder in a female already biologically susceptible to developing the disease. If eating disorders are not influenced by genetic, chemical, or biological factors, then theoretically, any female reading beauty magazines would be at risk for developing anorexia or bulimia, but the statistics indicate otherwise. To the best of my knowledge, there are plenty of healthy Vogue readers who are in a normal weight range.

While fashion magazines and other media outlets are not the primary cause of eating disorders, they don’t always bolster self-esteem in women or discourage unhealthy behavior or obsessions. The media’s portrayal of the perfect body as thin and even somewhat skeletal can lead to risky behaviors among young women. When society tells a woman that being size two is sexy, she will likely try her hardest to squeeze into those petite Levi’s, even if it means a diet that is not nutritionally sound. The obsession with thinness can help lead to low self-worth, unsafe dieting and body image problems among young women.

The mistake that people make is over-exaggerating the media’s impact on creating serious eating disorders. It is important to understand that the diseases are much more complex than girls reading magazines filled with skinny models, starving themselves, and dying of anorexia. The media can have a negative effect on a girl’s body image, but unless she is susceptible to an eating disorder, the effects on their own are not likely to cause anorexia or bulimia.