While advertising creates a disconnection between women - and men, to a lesser extent-and their bodies, it also offers food as a comforter and a proxy for human relationships, Kilbourne said. And on the island of Fiji, the arrival of television heralded a boom in dieting among women and girls who before then hadn’t realized that there was something wrong with them. “And failure to live up to them is inevitable because they are based on a flawlessness that doesn’t exist.” The American ideal of beauty has become so pervasive that 50% of three- to six-year-old girls worry about their weight.

“Women and girls compare themselves to these images every day,” Kilbourne said. Models are tall, slim, and light skinned, and digitally altered to ever-more unrealistic proportions. At the center of many of these ads is an image of idealized female beauty. The average American encounters 3,000 advertisements every day, and spends a total of two years watching TV commercials in their lifetime, Kilbourne said.

Kilbourne praised the work of STRIPED in her talk, calling it “a terrific program that is making a difference.” The event was sponsored by the STRIPED program (Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders), which is based at Harvard Chan and Boston Children’s Hospital, and co-sponsored by the School’s Health Communication Concentration and Department of Nutrition. Kilbourne, best known for her groundbreaking documentary on images of women in the media, Killing Us Softly, went on to deconstruct the subconscious messages in food and body image-related advertisements and to describe how they create a “toxic cultural environment” that harms our relationship with what we eat.

Chan School of Public Health on March 3, 2015. MaPeople often claim to ignore advertisements, but the messages are getting through on a subconscious level, pioneering author and ad critic Jean Kilbourne told an audience at Harvard T.

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