Today, I want to show you how ads affect your choice of foods, and how we can take back control over what we choose. They use various promotional techniques and tactics to influence our food choices, encourage us to change brands or just to buy and eat more.
Advertisements affect the food we eat because they convince us to eat products we were not already interested in. These mostly consist of novel food items of which we are not yet aware, and most victuals of this sort are junk food. So advertisements disproportionately drive us to consume junk food.
Any parent can tell you their children are bombarded with ads, marketing, and all sorts of explicit (and implicit) stimuli designed to affect their food choices.
Marketing unhealthy foods and drinks increase kids’ preferences for, and consumption of, energy-dense foods that have little nutritional value.2,3 Media and package ads influence not just what kids request, but what kids are willing to consume.
Advertising Drives the Influence of Junk Food
Unhealthy food and beverage marketing increases children’s preference and intake of energy-dense foods with little nutritional value.2,3 Media advertising and on-package advertising affect not only the foods children ask for but also which foods kids are willing to eat.8,19 A panel from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) conducted a systematic review of scientific evidence concluding that television advertising influences the preferences, purchasing requests, and nutrition, at least among children younger than age 12.6.
This evidence is most evident among younger groups because there are many more studies on younger children compared with adolescents. Although TV advertisements for unhealthy food for children constitute the majority of the evidence base for advertising effects on children, other types of marketing have been investigated.
A recent study published in the journal Appetite found that advertisements for unhealthy foods may counteract most of the effects of health advisory messages, as well as information about healthier foods. The study concluded that health warnings, like those about saturated fats dangers, are effective at changing peoples eating decisions, but only when there are no images or videos advertising unhealthy foods.
Numerous Studies Support this Position
The study, published by the University of Amsterdam, used two scientific approaches to test whether health warnings displayed either before or after participants chose between two food options might influence their ability to make healthy choices.
This study used a 2-by-2 factorial design, in which both the advertisement and the cognitive load were experimentally manipulated, to examine the effects of the food advertisement on food choices in general, as well as in the subset of participants that were given the higher or lower cognitive load tasks.
To ensure that the following analyses demonstrated the effects of food advertisements occurring beyond participants’ awareness, however, we excluded data from fewer participants (4 in each of the snack-and-nutrition-advertisement conditions) who either correctly assumed the study was about effects of food advertisements on eating behaviors, or who believed food advertisements may have affected the foods they consumed.
Smaller Children Are More Susceptible to Marketing
Experiments 1a and 1b In Experiment 1a, we tested our main hypothesis that elementary-school-age children consumed substantially more snack foods when watching a cartoon containing food advertisements. Elementary-school-aged children consumed 45 percent more snack food after watching a brief cartoon containing a food advertisement than children who watched the same cartoon featuring advertisements for other, non-food, products.
Methods In the following study, children were randomized to watch a cartoon that included food advertisements or other types of advertisements and was given snack foods during viewing. Results showed that children who saw an influential figure who had an unhealthy snack saw an influential figure who had an unhealthy snack dramatically increased their total consumption, as compared with seeing an influential figure who had no food item.
In the following studies, as well as among different populations, the promotion of food with ads promoting snacks, enjoyment, happiness, and excitement (i.e., most children’s food ads) was directly associated with increased intake. Early studies showed that children exposed to food advertisements consumed a greater amount of overall food energy than those exposed to non-food advertisements. Ads about unhealthy foods substantially increased the food intake in children, researchers found in an analysis of 22 different studies.
Experimental studies supported a causal effect of food ads on child eating behavior, showing that immediately following food ads, younger children were more likely to increase their food consumption of snack foods.
TV Advertisements Drive Obesity Rates
In conclusion, the findings described above suggest that TV food ads increased snacking behaviors and could be contributing to the obesity epidemic, and efforts are urgently needed to decrease the amount of unhealthy food that is advertised to children. A useful avenue for policy initiatives will be understanding whether increased exposure to healthier food advertisements would induce changes in consumption of, and preferences for, healthier foods and beverages among children.
Because a third of American children and adolescents are overweight or obese, it is imperative that we investigate to what extent television watching and television nutrition advertisements adversely affect the eating behaviors of children and adolescents, both currently and in the future. Exposure occurs in prime-time TV, too, especially through product placement, and is not a focus of voluntary, industry-led efforts to improve child nutrition and food advertising.
A U.S. study found that playing branded food-themed video games increased children’s intake of unhealthy snack foods, relative to playing games with healthier foods and those without foods.26 Within advergames, the video-rewarding ad technology, where players are shown a commercial before moving on to a new level, has been shown to be especially effective. Research has found a strong link between increased non-nutritious food advertising and rates of child obesity.
Pushback Against Gross Advertising Practices
Hedy Kober and PhD student Rebecca Boswell decided to examine the evidence about the effects of food signals–both actual foods and visual signals such as ads–and cravings on eating behaviors and weight gain. She says the findings, published online in Obesity Reviews, should motivate us to curb the ways that food companies market to us.
Lead author Dr. Christopher Ferguson, assistant professor in Behavioral, Applied Science, and Criminal Justice at Texas A&M International, and colleagues studied 75 children, aged three to five, who were invited to pick one of two fast-food items after watching ads promoting healthier and less-healthy options.
Public health advocates say that food companies are using food advertising to urge us to eat fatty foods and that they are linking our obesity epidemic to the unhealthy foods that we are seeing on television. By learning how to critically review ads and consumer marketing, today’s middle-school students will be better equipped to make healthy, responsible food choices. Help kids learn to research the food or product, and consider methods other ads are using to market their products.