A brand new examine within the American Journal of Preventive Medication discovered that simply 9 youngsters’s cereal manufacturers marketed on to children dominated purchases by households with children: Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Honey Nut Cheerios, Fortunate Charms, Pebbles, Reese’s Puffs, Toast Crunch and Trix.
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One of many high sources of added sugar in youngsters’s diets is of their breakfast cereal. A new examine exhibits that promoting drives gross sales of high-sugar cereals when it is aimed straight at children below 12 — however not when it targets adults.
“Cereal corporations do have wholesome merchandise, however the high-sugar ones are those that they really promote to children,” says Jennifer Harris, a senior analysis adviser on the Rudd Middle for Meals Coverage and Well being on the College of Connecticut.
Within the examine, printed within the American Journal of Preventive Medication, Harris and her colleagues checked out all cereals bought by 77,000 U.S. households over a nine-year interval, between 2008 and 2017. Additionally they checked out Nielsen rankings knowledge, which carefully monitored all of the advertisements that individuals in a family noticed — each youngsters and adults.
What they discovered was a robust relationship between how a lot promoting was focused to children and the way a lot sugary cereal that households with youngsters purchased. In truth, simply 9 marketed cereals dominated purchases by these households, and all of them had been excessive in sugar: That they had between 9 and 12 grams of sugar — a couple of tablespoon — per serving.
Manufacturers together with Fortunate Charms, Honey Nut Cheerios and Froot Loops made up 41% of whole family cereal purchases. About one-third of households with children purchased not less than one of many 9 manufacturers in a given month.
Against this, Harris says, there was no hyperlink to elevated purchases when advertisements focused adults.
“This examine exhibits that it is actually vital for these corporations with high-sugar cereals to really attain children — that folks in all probability would not purchase them if their children weren’t asking them for them,” Harris says.
Public well being officers have lengthy been involved in regards to the advertising of unhealthy meals to children. That is why, almost 20 years in the past, the meals business launched the Youngsters’s Meals and Beverage Promoting Initiative, a voluntary effort to police itself. The 21 collaborating meals corporations pledged to chop again on advertising unhealthy meals to youngsters below 12 — later revised to below 13.
However Lindsey Smith Taillie, a meals coverage researcher on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says these voluntary efforts aren’t making a distinction.
“For a very long time, we have identified that junk meals advertising to children was very prevalent in america, and it continues to be prevalent regardless of corporations pledging to do higher,” she says.
The examine is the primary to straight hyperlink meals promoting publicity by youngsters versus adults with subsequent purchases of those meals. Taillie, who was not concerned within the analysis, says the findings supply novel proof of how meals advertising influences what youngsters ask their dad and mom to purchase — an idea referred to as “pester energy.”
And this meals advertising also can form youngsters’s long-term preferences for unhealthy merchandise, Taillie says. “We have now good knowledge to indicate that behaviors which might be realized in childhood monitor into maturity,” which might result in poor well being outcomes over a lifetime.
In a written assertion to NPR, Daniel Vary, vice chairman of the Youngsters’s Meals and Beverage Promoting Initiative (CFBAI), defended the business’s efforts. He notes that the examine regarded solely at advertisements via 2017. He factors to a 2024 examine exhibiting youngsters’s publicity to cereal advertisements on TV programming aimed toward children has dropped dramatically.
“Corporations’ CFBAI commitments, which apply to each TV and digital media, have pushed these reductions in child-directed promoting and altered meals promoting to youngsters in a approach that’s not mirrored within the Rudd Middle report,” Vary stated.
Harris was one of many authors of that 2024 examine. She says most of that drop in promoting to children is because of a decline in TV viewing.
Ads, like children’ eyeballs, are shifting on-line, the place hyperpersonalization could make it even more durable to know what advertising youngsters are being uncovered to, Taillie notes.
Edited by Jane Greenhalgh
