Researchers stated on Wednesday that the commercials made to promote the fast food products are directly linked to the obese children. The research team proved that the forbiddance of such ads could reduce the number of overweight children with at least 18%.

This banning also happened in countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland and the officials from the National Bureau of Economic Research were a little skeptical about the possibility of imposing such governmental rules. Economist Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania stated that childhood overweight has always represented a stop in the United States culture, “but little empirical research has been done that identifies television advertising as a possible cause."

Still, he was optimistic about the fact that these kinds of discussions and demonstration could lead to serious talks about new policies which could stop the obesity trend in America. Chou and his team tracked 13,000 children from the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, both issued by the U.S. Department of Labor for the study.

Their findings were published in the Journal of Law and Economics, where they wrote that the commercial method used is “the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week." They concluded by saying that the results they had found clearly indicated a ban on the fast food ads.

If the ban is taken as a law then this could reduce the number of obese children with ages between 3 and 11 by 18% and the number of adolescents aged 12 to 14 by 14%.