Children don't begin to lose their way with their food habits for any one reason - it comes from all kinds of environmental variables. It depends on what they see their friends eating, it depends on what they see their parents eating, it depends on where they do most of their eating, and above all it depends on what they actually seem to like to eat. As much as influences in a child's life may seem to come from beyond the home, no parent actually wants to give up hope on what opportunities they have of personally modeling her child's behavior well. And in that spirit, what parent would want the outside influences of food and junk food advertisements to undo all the work they put in into keeping their child on the straight and narrow? With the explosive national problem of childhood obesity showing no sign of slowing down yet, one does have to wonder at the contribution in all of this of all the junk food advertisements on the TV.
There was actually an advocacy group for this: it is in Washington, and it is called the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They do what they sound like they do; when they took out a survey of the ethical policies that corporations employed in the way they advertised and sold their products to children, they were surprised that they had nothing to poll. About three-quarters of the 128 companies they polled had no policy on the ethics of marketing to children. About five years ago, to help battle the national child obesity problem, the Better Business Bureau started a program called the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative. About four out of five of all the major children's food advertisers signed up to it, promising that they would not target their advertisements at children under 12 if the foods they were trying to sell didn't meet their own standards for children's nutrition. And most of them still have no policy five years later on how to go about living up to their word.
To make them live up to their own standards for children's nutrition isn't that great an idea either; a company that makes sugar-loaded breakfast cereals isn't ever going to have any reasonable standards for children's nutrition - nothing like a parent would allow. Any given major brand of cereal has about 10 g of sugar in each serving. Kellogg's tries to aim for particularly high standards - they won't allow anything more than 12 g per serving for any food they will advertise to a 12-year-old. Some companies do deserve a little credit though; the candy bar maker Mars has a policy to not advertise to young children at all. It's not like any of these companies are trying to speak to the little children's appetites for fruit and whole wheat bread - it's sugary stuff that can only rot their teeth in put them on the road to childhood obesity. Think about it - your average five-year-old sees about 4000 ads for nutritionally questionable foods each year; and a 10 year old will see about 7000 ads of that kind each year. They even reviewed thousands of food advertisements on TV and found that not one tried to sell fruit or vegetables to children.
And then there are the movies of course. Children don't go to the movies that much, and childhood obesity researchers tend to overlook them. Well, that's a big mistake; companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi that have forever abstained from putting out advertising for children on TV, more than make up for it by plastering the movies with strategically placed products - chips, soft drinks and others - in movies certified for children. It's well known that any time any kind of food product appears in a hit movie, sales for it jumps up in the months following the movie's release. There is only one thing to do if you wish to stand up against this kind of irresponsible behavior that puts children on the path to childhood obesity. You can protest to the movie studios.
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