If you followed TV's lead, you might eat your way into the hospital.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Watching too much TV has been linked to depression and weight gain, but it doesn’t stop there. New research suggests it could indirectly lead to diabetes, heart disease, and a host of other chronic diseases. The reason? A report in the latest Journal of the American Dietetic Association finds that television food advertisements are severely slanted toward unhealthy foods. The study showed that even if you stopped your food intake at 2,000 calories a day, yet only ate the mix of foods you saw on television, you’d be taking in far more fat and sugar than is recommended, and far fewer nutrients such as fiber, calcium, iron, and vitamin D.

THE DETAILS: In collecting food ads, the study authors recorded roughly 90 hours of television during a recent fall television season. Each advertised food item was cataloged into a database and measured for nutritional value, including number of calories, fat grams, sodium content, and so on. Of the 3,584 TV ads that aired, 17 percent were food-related, and most of those—by far—were for fast food, says lead author Michael Mink, PhD, associate professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, and codirector of the Center for Public Health Media and Research.

After analyzing the nutrient content of each item, Mink and colleagues found that if a person only ate the foods being advertised, and stopped eating when he reached the daily recommended allotment of about 2,000 calories, he would consume 122 percent more cholesterol, 137 percent more saturated fat, 162 percent more sodium, and 182 percent more protein than the government recommends in its Food Guide Pyramid. That person would also get 25 times the recommended amount of sugar he should eat in a day. On the other hand, that person would get just half the recommended amount of calcium, B vitamins, and vitamin D, 5 percent of his daily fiber recommendation, a paltry 1.5 servings of vegetables, and not even a full serving of either fruit or dairy.

WHAT IT MEANS: It's not that surprising that food ads focus on unhealthy foods, says Mink. What’s surprising, he says, "is the degree to which these foods deviate from what people are supposed to be eating." Mink says the fast-food companies that advertise on television usually offer healthier alternatives, but those are rarely featured in their TV ads. And on the rare occasion when vegetables were advertised, Mink found it was usually the lettuce, pickles, onions, and tomatoes on a hamburger. "The issue isn't so much that these unhealthy foods are out there," he says, "but that they’re the only things being advertised."