Magazines and Eating Disorders

There has been a lot of recent controversy surrounding magazines and the messages they send to the public. One of the main problems is if magazines can cause eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia among young women. Traditionally, this has been thought to be due only to adolescent girls reading fashion magazines, in which they picture only models having long and slender bodies. However, there has been some recent studies indicating that not only is this true in fashion magazines, but also in health and fitness magazines. According to an article "Fitness Magazines and Eating Disorders: Is There a Relationship?", the "hard body" images shown in fitness magazines can distort the body image of young women just like the tall skinny models shown in fashion magazines. The studies show that girls you read fitness magazines are much more likely to display eating disorder tendencies then girls who don't. Overall, I thought this article was interesting because it shows that this problem of magazines and eating disorders may be more widespread than we originally thought. I also found interesting that the images of healthy fit people can cause unhealthy eating habits, rather than only images of excessively skinny and therefore unhealthy women.