Promising Approaches for Reducing

Junk Food Marketing to Children

Dr. Margo Wootan

Center for Science in the Public Interest

Although the rising childhood obesity rates and children=s poor diets are affected by many factors, one of the most important is food marketing.  Parents just can’t compete with food companies – we don’t have SpongeBob, sports stars, contests, and the latest market research to try to persuade our kids to eat their fruits and vegetables. 

Marketing has a negative effect on children’s diets because virtually all of the foods marketed to children are high in calories, salt, saturated fat, and refined sugars and low in nutrients.  And, those foods are marketed aggressively.  Children today are exposed to twice as much marketing as ten years ago. 

The last time that policymakers made any real attempt to address food marketing was back in the late 1970s.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recommended a ban on ads aimed at young children, limits on commercials for sugary foods aimed at older children, and that advertisers of sugary foods fund health messages to balance their advertisements.  Congress responded by passing a law to withdraw the FTC’s authority to issue industry-wide regulations to stop unfair advertising practices aimed at kids. 

As a result, food advertising aimed at children is now left largely to occasional FTC enforcement actions and to self regulation by the industries that have a financial interest in selling food to children, primarily by the Council of Better Business Bureaus’ Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU). 

CARU’s guidelines for children’s advertising include laudable goals, but their guidelines are too vague to be enforceable.  Also, the guidelines are not enforceable beyond a limited complaint procedure and voluntary action by a company.  Most importantly, case-by-case enforcement is not an effective approach.  Cases take time to build and often by the time a case can be brought, an ad campaign has run its course so the company doesn’t mind pulling it.  Also, simply changing how a sales pitch is couched doesn’t change the fact that most food ads aimed at children are for low nutrition foods. 

The FTC claims that it’s logistically impossible to limit junk-food marketing to children.  However, a number of other countries manage to.  Sweden, Norway, Austria, Luxembourg, the Flemish region of Belgium, and Quebec, Canada, have banned television advertising directed at children or during children’s programming.  Marketing and advertising in schools is prohibited in Belgium, France, Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, Quebec, Canada, and Vietnam. 

Companies argue that although they market their products directly to children, parents ultimately decide whether to purchase products.  The reality is that marketing aimed at children makes it extremely difficult for parents, schools, daycare centers and other caregivers to feed children a healthy diet.  To support parents and protect kids: 

U Congress should give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to work with the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine to set nutrition standards for the kind of foods that can and can’t be marketed to children. 

U The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state health departments should be funded to sponsor media-based campaigns to promote healthy eating and physical activity to balance the pressures to eat low-nutrition foods, like the CDC’s Youth Media (VERB) campaign, which uses paid advertising, PR, and community events and programs to promote physical activity to middle-school-age youth. 

U While we wait for regulatory changes, health professionals, parents, elected officials and organizations should call on food companies, restaurants, supermarkets, TV stations, and children’s magazines to market food responsibly to children.  CSPI has guidelines for responsible food marketing aimed at children that organizations can use or adapt. 

U Congress working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture or states or local school districts should remove low-nutrition foods from schools by implementing nutrition standards for foods sold out of vending, a la carte, fund raisers and similar venues and increase healthy offerings like fruits, vegetables and whole grains (like would be done by Senator Harkin’s and Representative Woolsey’s school foods bills). 

U States also should pass a law or school districts should put into place policies to prohibit the marketing of junk food in schools.  Senator Harkin’s HeLP America Act would allow the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to limit the advertising of nutritionally-poor foods in school that participate in the national school meal programs. 

For more information about these and other nutrition and physical activity policies, background materials, and model policies and legislation, visit www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy.

Margo Wootan DSc (mwootan@cspinet.org) is the director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. She founded and coordinates the activities of the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity, is a member of the Steering Committee and the co-chair of the Policy Subcommittee for the National 5 A Day Partnership. She has received numerous awards and is quoted regularly in the nation’s major media on subjects ranging from obesity and trans fat to public policy and child nutrition.