Washington:
It's not just that today's teenagers want to look slim and sexy, girls as young as three years are also now emotionally attracted to be thin, a new study on preschoolers has claimed.
Their awareness about flabbiness at this tender age is such that they even avoid touching game pieces that depict a fat individual, found the study.
The finding is troubling, since the pressure to be thin has been linked with a higher risk of eating disorders and depression, said Jennifer Harriger of Pepperdine University in California, who led the study.
Stressing that a negative view of fat people is not good, she said: "Weight-related teasing has also been linked to a variety of negative outcomes."
"Given that our society is currently dealing with an obesity epidemic, this is especially concerning," Harriger was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
While the study involved a group of 55 girls from the southwestern United States, Harriger said preliminary results from a replication of the study in Southern California suggest those girls also want to be thin.
She added that studies in other US regions are warranted: "It is impossible to generalise the findings from one study to the remainder of the US population."
For the study, published in the journal Sex Roles, Harriger and her colleagues looked at thin-ideal internalisation, which refers to the extent to which individuals embrace the cultural ideal of a slender body as their own personal standard.
Past research has suggested young kids are aware of anti-fat beliefs, but whether these children had really internalised the beliefs wasn't known.
To figure out whether the girls had more flattering thoughts about thin types than about fat types, the researchers had the preschoolers (3 to 5 years old) look at three figures identical in every way except for their body size -- thin, average and fat.
The children had to associate each of 12 adjectives (six positive and six negative adjectives) with a figure. It was found that an average of 3.1 negative words and 1.2 positive words were used to describe fat figures, compared with an average of 1.2 negative and 2.7 positive adjectives for thin figures.