A YouTube video featuring a "single frame" shot from a McDonald's ad in the middle of Food Network's Iron Chef has some convinced that the company is sneaking subliminal messages into the network's programming.

First of all, I think the offending image is more than one frame. It goes by quickly, but even at normal speed you can at least glimpse that something is there. Second, the practice of inserting one-frame ads goes back to the '50s when it was thought that such a gimmick would actually plant subliminal messages in people's brains. This was proved false almost as quickly when studies confirmed that the frames simply weren't long enough for anyone to truly register them.