Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States

Review
Posted by: SallyLouise on Tue, 20 May 08 22:11:33 +0000

This is a very well planned and executed piece of research which tackles an issue that highlights the size and scale of the food advertising children in the US are exposed to on a daily basis.

The research has a realistic agenda -- it is not claiming to have the answers to the problem of childhood obesity, but is aiming to measure how exposed children are to food advertising in order to help inform future research and policy making.

Because the research has a very sound methodology, particularly impressive is the way the survey team were briefed and trained as well as how the coding was monitored and specified, the data can be used with confidence to explore the area in more detail. The large sample numbers also add to this importance of this research, however it would be interesting to see if there was any sampling bias in terms of the time of year the data was collected. It is doubtful that the amount of advertising would change, rather the types of products may shift, from ice-cream in the summer to hot fast food in the winter, for example.

Combining the data collected from a previous study was interesting as it freed up time to focus specifically on collecting data on TV adverts, which seemed to work very well and created a powerful set of statistics.

The figures alone are quite shocking in terms of the amount of junk food advertising children are exposed to. As well as bringing in legislation to control the types of adverts children watch, it also seems that strategies to get children to do more with their time also needs to be developed, to physically take them away from the TV.

As the research monitored the volume of adverts children are exposed to it clearly points to the next phase of research which needs to measure how influenced children are by TV advertising, and how they influence the shopping habits of their parents. The worrying thing is that if children aren't influenced by the adverts they see then the food companies would not spend millions of dollars each year making them in the first place ... frighteningly they must be having some effect.