Health Tip – Audio Version - Playing around with kids
Health Tip – Healthy Next Step: Healthy Eating & Physical Activity Across Your Lifespan: Helping Your Child (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases)

Kids love online games. Food companies love to sell food. What happens when the two are put together?

A Kaiser Family Foundation report calls it “advergames” – Internet games that amount to product placements. Researcher Elizabeth Moore of Notre Dame examined games that, for instance, let kids bowl with candies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Dr. Bill Dietz took part in a seminar as the report was released. Dietz says parents should realize the games could make the kids ask for the foods – whether or not parents want kids to have them.

Dietz also says playing a video game is not the same as playing. He studied this, looking at metabolic rates – the rates at which people burn calories.

“The metabolic rate while playing a video game is probably the metabolic rate associated with vigorous fidgeting.”

Health Tip courtesy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Last revised: August, 15 2006