I'm glad that your reading my posts and encouraging critical discussion of this important topic. Sweden and Quebec do have bans on children's advertising and their obesity rates are not lower than other societies without such bans. This fact, however, was only one of a series of arguments in my blog as to why it is not likely that advertising is generating the obesity problem in the US. The blog also cites data from Nielsen showing that ads for ood beverages and restaurants directed to kids were down between 1993 and 2004, the period cited for the greatest obesity growth in this country. Dollars for these ads were also down when rates of inflation were held constant. Variation, in obesity rates across the US, even in closely contiguous areas, are dramatically different although advertising for food in this country is relatively uniform. This fact again argues against advertising being a major driver of obesity rates. Also, surveys carried out by the Center for Disease Control demonstrate that calorie intake among teenagers and children in the period 1988 to 2000 in comparison to the caloric intake in 1971 to 1974 were generally down accept for girls 12 to 16 years old. At the same time, surveys carried out by researchers at the University of North Carolina found that the amount of exercise in the US was down about 13% from 1980 to the year 2000. There are many other points that could be made, but in summary, there are manifold reasons to believe that advertising is not a major factor in the obesity crisis. It is the array of data rather than any single one of these factors that should make this clear to those who are interested in fact not rhetoric .