Daily HealthBeat Tip - May 14, 2007

Smoking in the movies

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Just before the movie starts, they show that little leader saying don’t smoke in the theater. So who smokes in the theater? The actors. You see it on the screen.

And young teens see it a lot. Researcher James Sargent of Dartmouth Medical School looked at data on 10- to-14-year-olds.  The study in the journal Pediatrics was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Sargent says about 530 popular movies delivered 13.9 billion instances of smoking. He says that amounts to a tobacco marketer’s dream.

Sargent says parents ought to limit their kids’ movies, including DVDs, to no more than two a week. And for the teens:

``Be skeptical any time you see someone smoking in the movies because it’s not like real-life smoking.’’ (5 seconds)

For one thing, nobody’s dying of lung cancer.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss

Last revised: May, 14 2007