Response Paper #3

Lin, Carolyn A, Yi Mou, and Carolyn Lagoe. "Communicating Nutrition Information: Usability and Usefulness of the Interactive Menus of National Fast Food Chain Restaurants." Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 4.3 (2011): 187-199.

            The author of this article is an associate dean and also the founder of the Communications Technology Division at the Association of Education and Journalism.  Carolyn also has obtained a Distinguished Research Faculty award and conducts research on health communications and also social marketing.  The author brings up the fact that unhealthy dietary habits have had huge effects on the increased number of obese people in our society.  The main argument that the author talks about is that the nutritional facts provided for consumers are not fully utilized and can sometimes be confusing to people trying to comprehend it. College students are this articles intended audience.  Students were selected to put together a breakfast lunch and dinner for one day from three different fast food chains that they would normally choose to eat if they had gone on a normal day.  They then had the students conduct new meal plans for a day without exceeding the normal calorie intake and sugar intake.  The conclusion of this study showed that most nutritional menus are usable but not necessarily useful because people had a hard time putting those menu items into a recommended daily food intake.  This text is very reliable since it comes from a dean from a graduate school and because the author has several awards and publications to back up her research.  Graphs of the sugar and calorie intakes of the meals planned from each task were helpful to see some actual numbers from the study.  Some strengths of this article are that it applies to a huge audience of people and that the information from the article is very useful.

            This text connects to my research because it talks about how fast food nutrition can be hard to understand for most therefore leading to consumption of more calories or sugar than most people need.  I found this research stunning considering that most fast food places put the calorie count right on the menu items and still people don’t understand the choices that they are making.

Castonguay, Jessica, Christopher McKinley, and Dale Kunkel. "Health Cues: A Content Analysis Of Health-Related Messages In Food Advertisements Targeting Children." Conference Papers -- International Communication Association (2011): 1-29. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.          

Jessica Castonguay is a graduate teacher associate at the University of Arizona and she is a communications major.   Most food advertisements viewed by children presently have food that contains high calorie and sugar intakes most commonly known by us as junk food.   The main argument of this article is that fast food advertisements contribute greatly to childhood obesity.  The intended audience of this article is to parents of children and anyone to try and put a stop to the increasing rates of childhood obesity.  The research method that they used was taking all advertisements shown during kid’s television shows during the hours of 7am to 10pm and then counting all the advertisements for fast food and seeing what the other advertisements were about.  Of the advertisements viewed about 56% of the food advertisements contained bad food choices while a third of the ads contained some type of fruit choice.  Lastly only about 6.6% of these advertisements included children showing some sort of physical activity. The strengths of this article is that most people watch  television so this applies to many people although this article does bring up that other advertisements appear on television that include good choices such as eating fruits and vegetables and participating in physical activity.

            This article will be useful for my research since it brings up the rising health problems  with  fast food companies advertising greatly during kids programming to get them to make unhealthy choices.  I think that fast food restaurants shouldn’t have so many commercials during kids programming so that kids can have a better chance of being healthier and fit.