While the amount of exposure to food advertising[advertising?:advertising material cutting machine] for children went down after a voluntary agreement to limit it, the amount of fast food advertising went up, and most of the foods still marketed to kids are unhealthy, according to a new report out today.
Published online in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, researchers looked at whether the advertising of unhealthy food and beverages to children had changed much since 2006 when many food companies signed onto the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a voluntary agreement to limit the number of unhealthy foods advertised on children’s programming. The researchers found that kids ages 2 to 5 saw an average of 10.9 food and beverage ads a day on television in 2009 while those ages 6-11 saw 12.7, decreases of 17.8 percent and 6.9 percent respectively from 2003. But the amount that advertised unhealthy foods - those high in saturated fat, sugar or sodium _ only decreased from 94 percent to 86 percent, said study lead author Dr. Lisa M. Powell, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“On the one hand, exposure to food advertising seen by children has fallen but on the other hand, the ads that kids continue to see, approximately 9 in 10 are for products that are unhealthy,” she said.
And the amount of fast food advertising aimed at those age groups went up 21.1 percent and 30.8 percent since 2003. Two of the largest fast food advertisers, McDonald’s and Burger King, have signed onto the agreement and did not increase much their ad exposure to children ages 2-5, Powell said.
“All of those fast food companies that weren’t members, their advertising increased substantially” she said. “So what we need to do is to get more fast-food companies on board to agree not to advertise to children.”
And even when those companies advertise their healthier meals with apple slices and milk, the default meal still comes with French fries and soda, said Dr. Jennifer L. Harris, director of marketing initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.
“It’s kind of a bait and switch,” she said.
What the new study shows is companies aren’t making much difference in what food is marketed to children, said Harris, who was not involved in the study.
“The issue is that the companies think that they are making progress by making small tweaks to the nutrition quality of the products that they’ve been advertising to kids all along whereas what the Powell paper[paper?:paper sample maker cutting machine] shows is that those minor tweaks aren’t really improving the nutrition quality of the products at all,” she said.
