Images of thin women 'can harm girls'

WATCHING stick-thin female frames on television can have an impact on women's health, according to a new scientific paper.

Dr Aric Sigman claims that seeing women on screen who are underweight but perceived as "normal" can be harmful to girls and women.

He said a biological mechanism which makes females become unhappy when they look at images of an abundance of underweight women has been identified. The relationship between media and body image was previously treated as a psychological or cultural debate but now must be treated as a medical one, said Dr Sigman.

"It is harmful to British girls and women," he said.

Dr Sigman, who has collated research from across the world for a paper in The Biologist, the journal of the Society of Biology, said that studies have found "strong and immediate" brain changes in confident and healthy women when they are exposed to images of thin and fat females.