Commercials. Advertising. Selling. It's about making people feel insecure enough that they feel compelled to buy the product. It's not about whether or not a calorie is energy or fat so much as how the commercial renders the viewer to feel inside. This manipulation is the heart of advertising... because advertisers need to compel you to keep spending money. On their stuff! Keep consuming what you are told you need to consume. Do as you are told. And then the tapes keep playing in your head about meaningless untruths like calories are fat and it's all gonna go to your thighs and some inane product song jingle you can't get out of your head, either.
If you leave television behind... eventually, a long time later... it stops happening like that so much. You don't feel as pushed and pulled. You can't even stand to pay attention to it anymore. There's too much else going on outside the TV set. And then... one day... you'll run into someone who still watches TV... and they'll start singing some stupid-sounding product jingle that you can't place at all because you've never heard it, and you can't tell them how silly they look repeating it.
The more people look to what's real and away from the picture box, the more people live for themselves... and aren't just buying because they were instructed to do so. People can develop a sense of self-worth that was otherwise attacked by emotionally manipulating commercials.
I really think there is something to this and that it's worth taking steps to protect yourself from being exposed to constant advertising. You may say you tune it out and it doesn't affect you or bother you but the mind absorbs a lot more in alpha state than you might realize.
TV alters brainwaves
http://www.corporations.org/media/tv.html
Effects of TV on the brain
http://www.eruptingmind.com/effects-of-tv-on-brain/
Television: The perfect drug
http://records.viu.ca/~soules/media112/ ... /index.htm
Who controls the media?
http://www.netscientia.com/media.html