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A German television channel on Wednesday tried to defend Heidi Klum as the press accused the blonde supermodel of driving young women to eating disorders with her reality show.
The privately owned ProSieben channel placed full-page advertisements in several newspapers with underwear-clad young women who have appeared on the programme asking "Are we too thin?"
Klum is currently hosting a fashion reality show on ProSieben called "Germany's Next Top Model", in which young women are weeded out by a jury until one wins a modelling contract.
A storm broke over the show when the German press said a willowy contestant had been voted out for being too fat, and published an interview with an anorexic young woman saying the show had encouraged her to undertake excessive dieting, although she was not a contestant.
In the advertisement, the women said they were "having a great time".
"We laugh, we learn, and we get closer to our big goal every day," the young women in their lingerie added.
Klum, 32, has reacted to the criticism, saying she did not set the norms for her profession.
"Models tend to be thinner than ordinary people. But who sets the standards? Not me," she told the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel.
But the media storm has prompted psychologists to weigh in, with some calling for the television show to be scrapped.
"This show gives the false impression that the thinner one is, the more one is worthy of love," said Detlev Nutzinger, who heads a psychology clinic in the northern town of Bad Bramstedt.
Ernst Pfeiffer, who runs a psychiatric unit for teenagers at Berlin's Charite hospital, told the press dieting had become fashionable among German teenage girls.
"Dietary disorders among young girls of 12 to 15 years old are definitely on the increase."
According to Berlin broadsheet Der Tagesspiegel one of the contestants on Klum's programme, a woman called Irina who weighs 52 kilograms (114 pounds), was knocked out of the running in an early episode because she was considered too plump.
Though she has not commented, another contestant who failed to make the grade told the Austrian tabloid Heute that the contestants were harassed about their weight.
"The show's team really provoke the girls with remarks about their weight. Even girls who are pencil thin are told they are too fat," Celine Roschek complained.
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AFPEntertainment-Germany-models-health-people
AFP 081237 GMT 02 06
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