Did you know that 83 percent of children under 6 use screen media any given day, and that 75 percent of that number watch television?

How about this one: did you know that 34 percent of TV food advertising aimed at children and teens is for candy and snacks? (The rest of the scary numbers: 28 percent is for sugared cereal; 10 percent is for fast food; 9 percent is for soda and soft drinks; 7 percent is for dine-in restaurants; 4 percent is for prepared foods; 4 percent is for dairy projects; 2 percent is for bread and pastries; and 1 percent is for fruit juices).

I guess no one makes advertising campaigns for, say, carrots. Or sweet potatoes.

Hmmm, I thought, as I looked over the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation’s new website, Kaiser Fast Facts, the source of all of these figures. I wondered how being couch potatoes and eating sugary snacks relate to childhood obesity? I typed in “obesity” in the website’s keyword search.

A-ha! Right away, I landed on “The Role of Media in Childhood Obesity,” a 2004 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Turns out there is indeed a significant relationship between watching television and food advertising and rates of obesity—so much so that the study suggests banning advertising of junk food to children, and that children under the age of 2 watch no television at all.

The things you can learn online! If you want to know more about U.S. healthcare—including policy information on Medicaid, insurance (and the uninsured), HIV/Aids, minority health and women’s health policy—Kaiser Fast Facts is handy for a quick glance at the facts, thanks to an extensive collections of graph- and chart-laden slideshows.

I found the entertainment media slideshows particularly fascinating—that’s where I found the information about children and viewing habits, an issue that concerns me as a parent.

That’s also where I found an interesting series of slideshows on how viewers of the TV show “ER” seem to have more knowledge of certain health issues—for example, before watching an episode on the human papilloma virus, only 19 percent of viewers knew it is associated with cervical cancer; 60 percent knew this one week after watching the episode.

In addition to the slideshows, Fast Facts offers QuickTakes, an inventory of bite-sized statistics. Here’s a sample: children ages 8 to12 see around 37 minutes work of TV advertising a day or more than 30,000 ads a year. Another one: nearly one in five U.S. women ages 18 to 64 were uninsured in 2006, and those women were more likely to be Latina, African American and Native American than white.

Fast Facts has two things going for it: a wealth of information and a presentation that’s easy to understand, even for those of us who aren’t very knowledgeable about health policy to begin with. As a woman and a parent—and as a human being—that feels very empowering.