Forget Big
Tobacco, Big Food Kills
By Marie Cocco
Truthdig
Mar
29, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070329_forget_big_tobacco_big_food_kills/
WASHINGTON—If we are what we eat and we eat what is
advertised, then American children are facing death by
junk food.
Half of all the advertising time on children’s
television shows is devoted to food ads, according to a
Kaiser Family Foundation study of food advertising aimed
at kids. And what do the commercials pitch? Candy,
cereal, fast-food and other restaurants, soda and other
sweetened drinks.
Just as surely as the tobacco industry tried for
years—and succeeded—in hooking young kids on its deadly
weed, the food industry is spending billions to
advertise products that will make the next generation
look and live like its porky parents: overweight, and at
great risk of debilitating disease and early deaths
linked to obesity.
Concerned by the lack of publicly available information
about food advertising to kids, the Kaiser foundation
went well beyond the 40 to 50 hours of programming that
had typically been reviewed in earlier studies and
examined 1,600 hours of TV fare. More important, the
foundation reviewed all types of programs that children
see—not just cartoons and other children’s shows but
sitcoms, reality shows, movies and others that older
children prefer.
The result is an alarming portrait of kids who are
bombarded with precisely the opposite message about food
and fitness than the one the government and the medical
profession agree is needed for good health. Children
between ages 2 and 7 see 12 food ads per day—that’s more
than 4,000 per year. Those in the next age group—the
pre-adolescent “tweens” between 8 and 12—see even more.
They’re tuned in to 21 food ads every day, or more than
7,000 every year. Teenagers see somewhat fewer ads, but
even they will view 17 food ads a day.
The foods that star in the ads aren’t broccoli or even
bread. Kids are pitched a super-sized lineup of ads for
candy and snack food, which account for 34 percent of
food ads aimed at them. Another third of the ads are for
cereal—and not the low-sugar kind.
While young children might beg parents for Pop-Tarts
instead of oatmeal, the apparent targeting of
pre-adolescents is aimed at a group that is just
beginning to get out on its own, have its own pocket
money, and begin choosing what to eat. “The tweens are
really a big target of food advertising,” says Vicky
Rideout, director of the Kaiser foundation’s Program for
the Study of Entertainment Media and Health.
And while a tween sees as many as 21 ads a day for
sweets or sugary sodas, the same kid is exposed to only
one public service announcement promoting fitness and
health every two to three days. “There are very few of
them on the air,” Rideout says.
Baby boomer parents who remember Tony the Tiger and the
Trix Rabbit may not leap to concern. But they might also
recall those long after-school bike rides and endless
afternoons of neighborhood kickball—not hour upon hour
plopped in front of video games or the television. The
combination of saturation advertising for junk food and
the sedentary lives that today’s kids lead already has
caused an unprecedented jump in childhood obesity—more
than 30 percent of children between 6 and 11 are
overweight and 15 percent are obese. The diseases they
develop, such as diabetes and high blood pressure,
weren’t commonly seen in kids a generation ago. Treating
them already is costing insurers, employers and
taxpayers billions.
It took more than four decades from the time of the
earliest government warnings about tobacco’s ill health
effects to bring that industry under what is a minimal
level of control—and even that came only after lawsuits,
some of them still moving slowly through the courts. The
food industry shouldn’t follow this contentious path. It
must step up what are now only preliminary efforts to
voluntarily change the content of the ads it produces
for children.
Otherwise it too could stand accused of killing our kids
for profit. There’s no way to sugarcoat that.
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