Why is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dropping over $400,000 for researchers to watch Kung Fu Panda? To discover how children perceive fat characters in movies and how they interpret that information.
The study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, titled “Pass the Popcorn,” targets “children’s perception of obesogenic culture in movies.” It aims to discover, among other related things, “what children observe in children’s movies about eating and activity behaviors, obesity, and stigma about weight status.”
The research criticizes movies like Kung Fu Panda, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel, and Shrek the Third, the Washington Free Beacon reports. According to the team’s lead researcher, “These children’s movies offer a discordant presentation about food, exercise and weight status, glamorizing unhealthy eating and sedentary behavior yet condemning obesity itself.”
They decided that 70 percent of the movies they studied “included weight-related stigmatizing content” and that “segments rated as ‘unhealthy’ by the researchers outnumbered those rated as ‘healthy’ by 2:1.”
A paper from the study includes some of the offending lines:
“Our team’s preliminary work has examined movies and found top-grossing G- and PG-rated movies depict unhealthy eating and sedentary activity as the norm, while simultaneously mocking overweight characters,” the grant reads. “The presentation of obesity, therefore, is condemning with the depiction of unhealthy food and exercise choices as positive.”
The grant claims that children “from minority backgrounds” are especially prone to frequent exposure to these movies, and that there is a lack of research on how children interpret cues like this.
The project is budgeted through August of next year.
h/t Free Beacon
