Protect Your Child From Dangerous Marketing

Many years ago, cigarette advertising included cartoon characters, such as Joe Camel, that lured children towards smoking cigarettes. That became illegal, but there are other legal marketing ploys today that lure children to crave fast food and junk food that can also damage their health.

In the US, food advertising and marketing is regulated by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which states that such marketing cannot be false, deceptive, or unfair.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has also created the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, which is “a voluntary self-regulation program comprising many of the nation’s largest food and beverage companies.”

If the words “voluntary” and “self-regulation” sound concerning to you, they should. Members of this Initiative pledge to only feature food options that meet certain criteria in ads directed at kids, while at the same time not emphasizing toys and promotional characters that will obviously heavily influence a child’s perception of the food.

Research has shown that the food industry’s supposed self-regulations are not working, with television advertisements for children’s fast food meals appearing significantly from those geared toward adults.

The ads geared toward children featured far more toy premiums and giveaways, for instance, along with food packaging images, street views of the restaurant and an emphasis on giveaways and movie tie-ins.
Now a panel of experts convened by the Healthy Eating Research program is calling for increased protection for children from predatory food marketing.

Expert Recommendations Call for Increased Protection for Children Aged 12-14:

According to the Healthy Eating Research report, the industry’s current voluntary self-regulation program doesn’t go far enough to protect children. Their recommended guidelines aim to “close major loopholes that currently leave kids unprotected.”

For starters, current regulations apply only to children aged 11 and under, which leaves a significant number of adolescents aged 12-14 at risk. The report notes that older children are uniquely impressionable and vulnerable to food marketing, in part because of their stage of brain and cognitive development.

In addition to being susceptible to marketing overall, adolescents are especially susceptible to marketing for tempting foods that require well-developed self-regulatory abilities to resist.

At the same time, older kids are exposed to stealth forms of marketing in social media that may be disguised as entertainment or even messages from peers. According to the report: “Children ages 12 to 14 face heightened risk from the influence of unhealthy food marketing due to their greater independence, higher levels of media consumption, and recent increases in the amount of marketing to children ages 12 and older for unhealthy food and beverage products.”

$1.6 Billion a Year Is Spent on Food Marketing to US Youth:

As you might imagine, the majority of that amount is spent on foods that are high in sugar, unhealthy fats and sodium and low in nutritive value. In fact, the foods most heavily targeted at children include soft drinks, sugary breakfast cereals, salty snacks, and baked goods.

As it stands, television ads are still the primary route that junk food makers target your kids. But that is quickly changing with the growth of digital technology. Food advertising spending on interactive video games targeting 3- to 11-year-olds was projected to reach $1 billion in 2014.

Junk food makers are also targeting kids via the Internet, cells phones and text messages, computer games and in movies. Currently, the average child sees 12 to 21 TV commercials for a food product every day, and food marketers continue spending on increasing numbers of ads because … it works.

What can you do?

Talk to your kids about what they’re seeing, and why fast food and processed foods simply aren’t good for them, despite what the ad says. Remember, ads are designed to sell products; not to tell the truth!
The Prevention Institute’s “We’re Not Buying It” campaign, is petitioning President Obama to put voluntary, science-based nutrition guidelines into place for companies that market food to kids.

You can sign this petition now!

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