Hey, kids! We've got sugar and toys
`Mommy, Mommy, look!" Morgan Foster, 5, pulls a box of Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch's Oops! ChocoDonuts cereal off a low grocery shelf. The cereal is displayed so he can easily see the picture of the Rugrats, Nickelodeon's popular cartoon characters, on the box. "Mommy, I want this," Morgan says.
"Why do you like that?" Pam Foster, 36, of Shady Side, Md., asks her son.
"It's good," Morgan explains. "I saw it on Cartoon Network!"
Harvard psychologist Susan Linn calls it "running the gantlet"--negotiating supermarket aisles filled with products heavily marketed to children. Today, in the face of a huge increase in childhood obesity, kids are bombarded by an unprecedented avalanche of food advertising. Indeed, food marketing aimed at children increased from $6.9 billion in 1992 to $15 billion in 2002.
This week, the Center for Science in the Public Interest is releasing the first comprehensive report detailing the plethora of ads, toys, Web sites, movie and television tie-ins, school programs, and other marketing practices designed to make children want--and eat--food, most of it unhealthful. "Food marketing has become so pervasive that it's everywhere children are throughout their day," says Margo Wootan, the center's director of nutrition policy and the author of the report.
A trip to any grocery store or fast-food restaurant or an hour of watching children's television proves her point. Disney's Princess Fruit Snacks--little more than fruit candy--are formed into glass slippers and other characters familiar to little fans of the Disney Princess movies. There are cheese crackers, pasta, cereal, fruit snacks, and more shaped like Cartoon Network's popular detective dog, Scooby-Doo. The Hulk sells Oreo cookies and Oscar Mayer "Lunchables" (some with 38 grams of fat per lunch). For preteens, there's American Idol Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tarts. McDonald's, a pioneer of "advertoys," had 14 different toy sets to promote its "Happy Meals" in 2001. Here's the marketing genius, though: Each set was available only for three or four weeks, pressuring parents to be regular patrons to collect all the toys for their kids.
"What the marketers want to do is get kids to nag their parents for the food, for the toys," says Linn, associate director of the media center at Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston. A 1998 study on the "Nag Factor" showed that 1 in every 3 visits to a fast-food outlet was attributable to children's begging.
Happy, cool. Television advertising--especially on kid-oriented channels like Nickelodeon and Disney--remains marketers' prime tool for selling food to kids. Harvard's Linn says that before age 8, children "don't understand persuasive intent, that an ad is designed to manipulate them to buy something." Linn taped six hours of weekend television on Nickelodeon, the network with 41 of the top 50 children's programs, and counted 40 food ads. "Most ads don't mention taste," she says. "The message is eating will make you happy, cool; eating will give you friends. These are exactly the messages we don't want kids to have about food."
More than 90 percent of the products advertised on children's television are high in fat, sugar, or salt. A nutritional analysis of ads on afternoon and Saturday television for kids found that 50 percent were for foods in the "fats, oils, and sweets" categories. Nearly 26 percent of the ads were for high-sugar cereals. None promoted fruits or vegetables.
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