1. Comenius Project “The Consumer Society and Youth in Europe” School year 2009-2010 Survey on Body Cult Results of the Italian students I.T.C. A. Zanon – Udine

2. What defines best the term 'body cult'?

3. Most students think that the term “body cult” means the fact that one takes too much care of one’s body and keeps it clean and tidy. The term “body cult” includes besides making-up, using cosmetics, body building, wearing special clothes, tattooing and piercing.

4. Our italian students think that in the term “body cult”can be included some practises and in particular body building(15,5%),silicon implants(11%), wearing special clothe(10,4%) and piercing and tatooing(9%)

5. So some of them have their body pierced and tattooed because they want to be more attractive(37%), in this way they express their own identity (26%) and in order to be like their role models (5%).

6. Some ways to take care of the body are doing sports and eating healthy food to have a balanced diet.

7. They are influenced by advertisments and commercials and also by fashion and trends and so they usually spend a large sum of money taking care of their body appearance.

8. Young people like following fashion and trends related to body appearance. In this way they feel satisfied and happy when having their body appearance changed.

9. Talking about sports, nearly the majority of youngers practices sport at least 3 times a week.

10. Many people smoke daily in particular when they are with their friends; this isn’t good for keeping fit and healthy.

11. Sport is good for your health and keeps you fit. This is linked to a good body appearance. Almost all the students surveyed agree that a person is beautiful if he or she is normal in terms of weight and looks like his/her natural self and he or she is nice if the person is clever and beautiful.

12. To summerize…

13. People are quite obsessed with image as never before. We are bombarded with advertisements of super fit models. We are prepared to do anything in order to achive a beautiful body and look like those models that mass media show us. Eating well, doing sport, have a balanced diet and care for our body can help ourselves to feel fit. So it is necessary for people to pay attention to good habits and choose the once which can garantee the well-being of our body!