Children Conned With Junk Ads

CEBU, Philippines - Apparently, no one seems to care if children are attacked with extensive marketing and advertising for junk food or food of poor nutritional quality. The predatory nature of unhealthy food advertising messages on children leaves two to five year olds helpless because they have no cognitive abilities to defend themselves. No nutrition council in the Philippines seems remotely aware of this menacing concern.

Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity hoisted the alarm in 2009 when it released a study called, "Nutrition and Marketing Ratings of Children's Cereals." The study concluded that the least healthy cereals are the ones most marketed to children. The trend apparently is the same with junk food. Cereal companies as well as companies that manufacture junk food like chips and chocolates aggressively market least nutritious products directly to children.

Child cereals reportedly contain 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber and 60 percent more sodium when compared to adult cereals. Worse, about 42 percent of these cereals contain potentially harmful food dyes. Yet regulation is minimal even when children in the US are exposed to large amounts of marketing for highly-sugared cereals, more than any other category for packaged food. Extensive marketing to children for foods of poor nutritional quality was partly blamed for the obesity crisis among children.

Parents are generally wary about their children's health especially in the formative years. Parents have their children administered with booster shots to protect them from infections. Then when children are of pre-school ages, they have waiting nannies in school to keep children safe from unruly playmates. But while parents are so encumbered with over protection, they leave their children as defenceless game to advertising predators who prey on children with distorted messages that make high-sugar, high-sodium junk food good for them.

Advertising plays sweetie with junk food.

Yale University's doctors and researchers used a comprehensive and independent science-based evaluation of cereal company marketing called, Cereal FACTS (acronym for Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score) to establish the relationship between advertising and nutrition. Cereal FACTS reported that ready-to-eat cereals are the largest category of packaged food marketed directly to children spending $229 million in 2006. Marketing practices range from television advertising, marketing on the internet, and in-store marketing like shelf allocation.

The evaluation revealed that the average child in the US views 1.6 ads on television everyday for cereal products with poor quality nutrient profile. Children view over five times as many of these food value distorting ads that have little to do with food. Instead, cereals are represented as toys or play things, playmates in exciting adventures and magical entities. Often the main purpose of child cereal ads and junk food ads is to associate these poor quality products with positive emotional experiences like having fun, being cool or acceptance by peers.

The disparity here is that while government promotes nutrition, it does not regulate ads that extensively and aggressively target children to eat junk food, discourage nutrition or ads that dictate changes in diet. It was also found that many labels of cereals and junk food do not reflect the real nutrient value.

Some two years later, the US federal government took action on the results and recommendations of the 2009 study. Only this July, The Washington Post reported that the largest food companies in the US said they will cut back on marketing unhealthy food to children. Earlier, the federal government came up with guidelines for marketing junk food to children. Among others, the guidelines discourage advertising of unhealthy food on product labels and on media including radio, television, print, video games and the Internet.

Industry players balked at the proposal as being too broad that it limits marketing of almost all of the nation's favourite food like yogurts and children's cereals.

Thing is, if government and nutrition councils can't do much about extensive advertising on children, the parents can. Controlling children's viewing habits and not buying unhealthy food can make a dent on the profit margins of the industry where regulation can't.