VOA常速英语: Hollywood's images of smoking encourage teens to light up

每每看到电影中的偶像明星吸烟时的“酷酷”模样，实在难忍来一根的冲动。都是“明星效应”惹的祸！面对青少年“模仿型”吸烟不断增长的问题，好莱坞在行动——

Filmmakers in Hollywood produce hundreds of films each year and audiences around the world watch them. In many films, characters smoke cigarettes and other forms of tobacco. In the past, researchers have documented how adolescents in the United States are influenced by watching those images of smoking on the screen.They found that kids who watch many movies where characters smoke are more likely to try smoking themselves.

Dr. James Sargent, a researcher with Dartmouth University Medical School in New Hampshire, says those research findings are strong and consistent, but he says that many people are skeptical when they hear that movies might contribute to adolescent smoking. "How can movies be responsible for a third of adolescent smoking when there's only, you know, 30 seconds to a minute of smoking in every movie? So what we wanted to do with this study was really scale the exposure for people so that they understood how much exposure kids really get when it comes to seeing these actors modeling smoking on the big screen."

Sargent and some international colleagues counted how often images of smoking were seen by adolescents. They watched about 500 popular movies and counted the images of smoking in each. Then they multiplied that number of images by the number of adolescents estimated to have seen the films. They estimate that billions of images of smoking in American films that are seen by kids around the world.

"So it is a big international problem to the extent that American movie companies are exporting smoking in youth-rated movies, the kids in other countries are seeing the smoking, and it's positioning smoking as something they want to do," he concludes.

Sargent says almost nothing else compares with smoking in terms of public health problems around the world. Millions of people die annually of diseases caused by smoking: lung and other cancers, heart disease and respiratory diseases. Sargent says many of those people started smoking during their adolescent years.

"We've already shown pretty convincingly that seeing smoking in movies is delivering kids to the tobacco industry," he says."So the movie industry has some responsibility here.The movie industry could do something that would eliminate smoking in youth-rated movies, they could rate smoking R (for restricted)." He notes that's what public health activists are trying to get filmmakers to do. And if they did that, it would eliminate 60 percent of growth of impressions the kids in his sample had seen.

Sargent notes that's that public health activists are trying to get filmmakers to do.He said that if Hollywood did that,it could eliminate 60 percent of impressions in his sample had seen.

Sargent's research was published in the most recent issue of the journal Pediatrics.