A brand new examine within the American Journal of Preventive Medication discovered that simply 9 kids’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.
Cathy Scola/Getty Photographs
conceal caption
toggle caption
Cathy Scola/Getty Photographs
One of many high sources of added sugar in kids’s diets is of their breakfast cereal. A new examine reveals that promoting drives gross sales of high-sugar cereals when it is aimed instantly at children underneath 12 — however not when it targets adults.
“Cereal firms 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 Heart 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. In addition they checked out Nielsen scores knowledge, which intently monitored all of the adverts that folks in a family noticed — each kids and adults.
What they discovered was a powerful relationship between how a lot promoting was focused to children and the way a lot sugary cereal that households with kids purchased. The truth is, simply 9 marketed cereals dominated purchases by these households, and all of them had been excessive in sugar: They’d 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 complete family cereal purchases. About one-third of households with children purchased a minimum of one of many 9 manufacturers in a given month.
Against this, Harris says, there was no hyperlink to elevated purchases when adverts focused adults.
“This examine reveals that it is actually essential for these firms with high-sugar cereals to truly 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 concerning the advertising of unhealthy meals to children. That is why, practically twenty years in the past, the meals trade launched the Youngsters’s Meals and Beverage Promoting Initiative, a voluntary effort to police itself. The 21 collaborating meals firms pledged to chop again on advertising unhealthy meals to kids underneath 12 — later revised to underneath 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 the US, and it continues to be prevalent regardless of firms pledging to do higher,” she says.
The examine is the primary to instantly hyperlink meals promoting publicity by kids 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 kids ask their mother and father to purchase — an idea often called “pester energy.”
And this meals advertising may form kids’s long-term preferences for unhealthy merchandise, Taillie says. “We have now good knowledge to point out that behaviors which can be realized in childhood observe into maturity,” which might result in poor well being outcomes over a lifetime.
In a written assertion to NPR, Daniel Vary, vp of the Youngsters’s Meals and Beverage Promoting Initiative (CFBAI), defended the trade’s efforts. He notes that the examine appeared solely at adverts by way of 2017. He factors to a 2024 examine displaying kids’s publicity to cereal adverts on TV programming aimed toward children has dropped dramatically.
“Firms’ CFBAI commitments, which apply to each TV and digital media, have pushed these reductions in child-directed promoting and adjusted meals promoting to kids in a manner that’s not mirrored within the Rudd Heart report,” Vary mentioned.
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 transferring on-line, the place hyperpersonalization could make it even more durable to know what advertising kids are being uncovered to, Taillie notes.
Edited by Jane Greenhalgh