American children are practically being brainwashed by the overwhelming number of TV ads for sweets and junk food available for viewing.

As if there was any need for yet another report about the negative influence television has on children and how it more or less subtly manipulates them. The Kaiser Family Foundation has nevertheless published a report.

The study, apparently the largest, most comprehensive study of its kind, had its researchers accomplish some colossal work in order to reach their conclusions. The researchers looked at 1,638 hours of programming and analyzed nearly 9,000 food and beverage ads.

This gigantic effort had some saddening bottom lines. None of the food advertisements targeted to kids were for fruits or vegetables, and more than half the ads they saw were for candy, snacks or fast food.

Boys and girls between ages 8 and 12 watch as many as 21 food ads per day (which amounts to 7,600 television ads every year). And “the vast majority of the foods that kids see advertised on television today are for products that nutritionists would tell us they need to be eating less of, not more of,” says Vicky Rideout, a coauthor of the report and director of the Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Furthermore, these pre-teenagers, or “tweens,” are of particular concern says Rideout, because “this is an age group whose members are getting allowances and just starting to make their own choices about food.”

The other age-groups are not luckier by much. Teens aged 13 to 17 viewed 17 food ads a day, or 6,000 a year. Children ages 2 to 8 years two to eight saw the fewest food ads at 12 a day, or 4,400 a year (which is still tremendous).

The study also found that about 34 percent of the ads kids viewed were for candy and snacks, 28 percent were for cereal and 10 percent were for fast foods. Four percent of the ads pitched dairy products, and just one percent marketed fruit juice. Of the 8,854 commercials the Kaiser study included, none were for fruits or vegetables.

The study focused exclusively on the amount and content of food advertising aimed at children, and not on the purchasing behavior of these kids or of their parents, as a result of the commercials they viewed.

In compiling the report, Kaiser researchers looked at a week's worth of content from 6 a.m. to midnight between May and September of 2005. They collected data from the parents of more than 4,000 children to determine how much time kids watched TV and how much time they spent watching children's shows (where the amount of ads are limited by law, but where more ads, 50 percent of all ad time, are for food) as well as non-children's programming.

In December 2006, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement (“Children, Adolescents and Advertising”), warning that children are overwhelmed by advertisements from the cradle. The outcome? Obesity, smoking, drinking, premature sex and more.

The academy also asked Congress to implement a ban on junk food advertising, as childhood obesity has become one of the major health concerns among pediatricians.

The Kaiser Family Foundation study only backs this up. It’s hard not to make a connection between advertising and childhood obesity.