BOSTON, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- "Secondhand TV" -- indirect media exposure through others' viewing -- may be more damaging to a teen's body image than the teen watching, U.S. researchers say.
Dr. Anne Becker of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and colleagues examined the link between media consumption and eating disorders among adolescent girls in Fiji.
The researchers find not only are media consumption and eating disorders among adolescent girls in Fiji linked, but surprisingly even those not watching TV at home had raised risk levels of eating disorder symptoms if their friends and schoolmates had TV access.
The study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry finds higher peer media exposure linked to a 60-percent increase in a girl's odds of having a high level of eating disorder symptoms -- independently of her own TV viewing.
"Our findings suggest that social network exposure is not just a minor influence on eating pathology here, but rather, is the exposure of concern," Becker says in a statement. "If you are going to think about interventions, it would have to be at a community or peer-based level."
Becker says eating disorder symptoms have been going up among teen girls in Fiji -- a culture that traditional prizes a robust body shape -- since the introduction of broadcast television to the island nation in 1995.
