A brand new examine within the American Journal of Preventive Drugs discovered that simply 9 kids’s cereal manufacturers marketed on to youngsters dominated purchases by households with youngsters: Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Honey Nut Cheerios, Fortunate Charms, Pebbles, Reese’s Puffs, Toast Crunch and Trix.
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One of many prime sources of added sugar in kids’s diets is of their breakfast cereal. A new study reveals that promoting drives gross sales of high-sugar cereals when it is aimed straight at youngsters below 12 — however not when it targets adults.
“Cereal corporations do have wholesome merchandise, however the high-sugar ones are those that they really promote to youngsters,” says Jennifer Harris, a senior analysis adviser on the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health on the College of Connecticut.
Within the examine, printed within the American Journal of Preventive Drugs, Harris and her colleagues checked out all cereals bought by 77,000 U.S. households over a nine-year interval, between 2008 and 2017. Additionally they checked out Nielsen rankings knowledge, which carefully monitored all of the advertisements that individuals in a family noticed — each kids and adults.
What they discovered was a powerful relationship between how a lot promoting was focused to youngsters and the way a lot sugary cereal that households with kids purchased. Actually, simply 9 marketed cereals dominated purchases by these households, and all of them have been excessive in sugar: That they had 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 youngsters purchased at the least one of many 9 manufacturers in a given month.
In contrast, Harris says, there was no hyperlink to elevated purchases when advertisements focused adults.
“This examine reveals that it is actually essential for these corporations with high-sugar cereals to truly attain youngsters — that folks most likely would not purchase them if their youngsters weren’t asking them for them,” Harris says.
Public well being officers have lengthy been involved in regards to the marketing of unhealthy foods to youngsters. That is why, practically 20 years in the past, the meals trade launched the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a voluntary effort to police itself. The 21 taking part meals corporations pledged to chop again on advertising and marketing unhealthy meals to kids below 12 — later revised to below 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 recognized that junk meals advertising and marketing to youngsters was very prevalent in america, and it continues to be prevalent regardless of corporations pledging to do higher,” she says.
The examine is the primary to straight 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 and marketing influences what kids ask their dad and mom to purchase — an idea often called “pester energy.”
And this meals advertising and marketing also can form kids’s long-term preferences for unhealthy products, Taillie says. “We have now good knowledge to indicate 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, vice chairman of the Youngsters’s Meals and Beverage Promoting Initiative (CFBAI), defended the trade’s efforts. He notes that the examine regarded solely at advertisements by means of 2017. He factors to a 2024 study exhibiting kids’s publicity to cereal advertisements on TV programming aimed toward youngsters has dropped dramatically.
“Corporations’ 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 approach that’s not mirrored within the Rudd Heart report,” Vary stated.
Harris was one of many authors of that 2024 examine. She says most of that drop in promoting to youngsters is because of a decline in TV viewing.
Commercials, like youngsters’ eyeballs, are transferring on-line, the place hyperpersonalization could make it even tougher to know what advertising and marketing kids are being uncovered to, Taillie notes.
Edited by Jane Greenhalgh
