Microeconomic Principles
By Dr. Jose J. Vazquez-Cognet
Presented by Coursera and
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
WEEK 4
PROJECT SAMPLE
Childhood Obesity Kills
BY
CHRIS PARK
2013 2.20
Project Overview
As I have been taking the online course for microeconomics, I learned so much about
the simple yet complex relationship between supply and demand within the economy. I
became aware of how things are related and give off diverse effects to each other. After
being asked to think of a topic or issue I could base my project on, I immediately
thought up of basing my project on the issue with child obesity. Especially, how
corporations use TV and other technology to advertise their products and make it more
appealing to children. In other words, I plan on researching and finding out more of how
these corporations and their “propaganda” is affecting the health of society’s children
and also how it increases their profits while lowering the demand in fresh ingredients.
Plan and Research
Well, first of all I have to offer some basic statistics that I’ve found while working on my
project.

Currently, there are over 43 million children under the age of 5 who are
overweight or obese worldwide.

Severe obesity can shorten one’s lifespan by 10 years.

Worldwide, there are 1.5 billion adults who are overweight or obese.

Severe obesity can result in very expensive medical bills costing a person
$10,273,973 per hour!
Children in the US spend more than 44.5 hours on technology such as the TV,

computer, video games etc.

Research has found that children who watch more than 3 hours of TV are 50%
more likely to become obese than those who do not.

Food ads which usually consist of highly unhealthy food such as candy, soda, and
fast food make up for 50% of all advertisement on TV.
So these are a few facts that one should know in order to realize how severe the issue
with child obesity actually is. Here is a chart that I found made by the AMERICAN
PSYCHOLOGY ASSOCIATION.
Ages
No. of ads per day
Hrs of ads per year
No. of ads per year
Exposure to PSAs
2-7
12
29:31
4,427
1 every 2-3 days
8-12
21
50:48
7,609
1 every 2-3 days
13-17
17
40:50
6,098
<1 every week
As we can see from above, children are constantly exposed to food ads. It has been
proven that children around the age of 8 enter a critical stage in development regarding
in how they eat and with constant exposure to such unhealthy food, it results in children
having an unhealthy diet throughout their whole lives.
My plan includes gathering up all this information and trying to see how we can get
corporations to stop manipulating young children and brainwashing them into eating
such unhealthy foods. Corporations are guilty of taking advantage of young oblivious
children in order to make high profits.
The results of my final project would be the reduction and decrease of food ads aimed
for young children. The project’s outcome would result in:
-
Cooperating with broadcast companies to ban all ads designated for persuading
children to buy their unhealthy food products.
-
Making children more aware about healthy foods and their importance through
special lectures and presentations at schools.
-
Informing parents on how child obesity can be developed and also how to avoid
it from developing.
Graph
This is a graph that I drew in order to explain the relationship between the supply of
food and the demand for food.
The graph has three main relationships. S1 and D1 are just the constant I used to show
the increase for S2 and S3. Even though, the demand for fast food has increased
tremendously, the price of fast food still went up. Although, we can still see that fresh
food is still far more expensive. There are many reasons on why both S3 and D3 shifted
to the right, but the primary reason is due to large amounts of food ads produced by
the corporations. Most Americans are exposed to the TV and the internet, and usually
that exposure consists of food ads made by corporations. These ads usually do not
contain the unhealthy facts of their products because that would defeat the purpose of
them advertising their products.
Although, in the economy, more profits are usually a good thing, this kind of increase
only benefits a selected few. The rest all suffer from long term damage and in extreme
cases result in death. Child obesity is highly like to develop into severe obesity
throughout adulthood and can result in very expensive medical fees. Overall, we can see
an unnatural occurrence of death from obesity which would definitely hurt the economy.
Less and less fresh foods are being bought which can often result in supermarkets
closing and depriving citizens from finding a place where they can buy and eat healthy
food.
That is why I want to put an end to this problem. To stop fast food corporations from
adding fuel to the already intense fire that is killing society’s adolescents. In proportions,
it may be okay, but manipulating children who have no developed sense of reason is
wrong and should be stopped. Schools and parents need to do a better job in educating
their children in making the right decisions. I hope that my project will be able to help
those children and prevent them from developing something that may cost them their
lives.
References
http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution/sign-petition
http://www.apa.org/topics/kids-media/food.aspx?item=2#