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 examine exhibits 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 Heart for Meals Coverage and Well being 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 information, which carefully 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 youngsters and the way a lot sugary cereal that households with kids purchased. In actual fact, 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 whole family cereal purchases. About one-third of households with youngsters purchased at the least 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 exhibits that it is actually vital for these corporations with high-sugar cereals to truly attain youngsters — that oldsters 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 concerning the advertising and marketing of unhealthy meals to youngsters. That is why, practically 20 years in the past, the meals business launched the Youngsters’s Meals and Beverage Promoting Initiative, a voluntary effort to police itself. The 21 collaborating 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 the US, 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 referred to as “pester energy.”
And this meals advertising and marketing may form kids’s long-term preferences for unhealthy merchandise, Taillie says. “We now have good information to indicate that behaviors which are realized in childhood monitor 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 business’s efforts. He notes that the examine regarded 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 youngsters has dropped dramatically.
“Firms’ CFBAI commitments, which apply to each TV and digital media, have pushed these reductions in child-directed promoting and altered meals promoting to kids in a method 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 youngsters is because of a decline in TV viewing.
Commercials, like youngsters’ eyeballs, are shifting on-line, the place hyperpersonalization could make it even more durable to know what advertising and marketing kids are being uncovered to, Taillie notes.
Edited by Jane Greenhalgh
