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Food adverts targeting children and childhood obesity, is there a link?
Maureen Nabatanzi
- January 22, 2021
Food adverts targeting children and childhood obesity, is there a link?
It is natural for parents and care givers to be protective of children. It is the role of parents and other adults entrusted to care for children e.g. relatives, family friends, nannies, health workers and school teachers to ensure that children are clean, safe, healthy, happy, fed and well cared for. Nurturing children should include provision of an environment where they can achieve the five components of nurturing care: good health, adequate nutrition, safety and security, responsive caregiving and opportunities for learning.
Unhealthy food environments are ones in which children are regularly exposed to food advertising and marketing through television, the internet, social media, magazines, schools, posters, bill boards, video games, cell phones, and other means. Unfortunately, most of these products have excessive amounts of added sugars, salt, and saturated fat, and inadequate amounts of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Some food companies have gone as far as using fellow children and celebrities in the adverts.
A tempting milk-cookie advert and a beverage company advert featuring Fresh Kid, a child celebrity in Uganda
The aim of these advertisements is to promote product brands, sales and consumption of these foods. Young children can be vulnerable to these advertising strategies because they are developmentally less able to comprehend their persuasive intent. These adverts influence children’s food preferences, parental demands, choices and in turn consumption of the advertised unhealthy foods.
Why should this concern us? Unhealthy food marketing aimed at children and teens is a significant contributor to poor diet quality and diet-related non-communicable diseases like coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. Globally, there is a rise in childhood obesity and chronic diet related disease. In Uganda, 16% of adolescent girls were obese in 2016, a rise from 2.1% in 2014. In contrast, most countries have been slow in implementing legislation that protects children from persuasive marketing and advertising of unhealthy foods to children.
What we can do: Recognizing that children are being targeted by food companies is step one. Although marketing is not inherently wrong, targeting children using persuasive language for low nutrient, high calorie, sugar and salt foods that could increase their risk of disease is not okay. And other countries have done something about it; for example, the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa discourages less healthful food promotional activity on television directed at children younger than 12 years of age. The American Heart Association supports policy change that limits the marketing and advertising of low-nutrient, high-calorie foods and beverages to U.S. children. This is based on years of research that has shown a link between constant exposure to unregulated advertising of unhealthy foods and increase in childhood obesity.
In Uganda we have taken note and seek to do something about it. Funded by the Government of Uganda through the Makerere Research and Innovations Fund (MakRIF); and supported by key national and global experts, at Makerere University we have recently developed an action project titled “Food and beverage Advertising to Children in Uganda (FACe-U)”.
The FACe-U Project is measuring children’s food marketing environments to develop effective policies which improve children’s health outcomes and prevent non-communicable diseases. This project aims to describe the type, magnitude and methods of food advertising targeting children. Knowing how children are being targeted and the methods used by the different food products will contribute information for parents, all persons involved in child care and policy makers. This knowledge will be transferred to society at large to help us understand how to protect children by providing nurturing environments where they receive adequate nutrition to be healthy.
About the Author
The writer, Maureen Nabatanzi is a Public Health Nutritionist and Research Fellow with the FACe-U project. She can be reached on mnabatanzi@musph.ac.ug
