A brand new examine within the American Journal of Preventive Medication discovered that simply 9 kids’s cereal manufacturers marketed on to children dominated purchases by households with children: 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 high sources of added sugar in kids’s diets is of their breakfast cereal. A new examine reveals that promoting drives gross sales of high-sugar cereals when it is aimed instantly at children 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 children,” says Jennifer Harris, a senior analysis adviser on the Rudd Middle for Meals Coverage and Well being on the College of Connecticut.
Within the examine, revealed within the American Journal of Preventive Medication, Harris and her colleagues checked out all cereals bought by 77,000 U.S. households over a nine-year interval, between 2008 and 2017. In addition they checked out Nielsen scores knowledge, which intently 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 children and the way a lot sugary cereal that households with kids purchased. In truth, simply 9 marketed cereals dominated purchases by these households, and all of them had been excessive in sugar: That they had between 9 and 12 grams of sugar — a few 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 children purchased not less than one of many 9 manufacturers in a given month.
In contrast, Harris says, there was no hyperlink to elevated purchases when adverts focused adults.
“This examine reveals that it is actually essential for these corporations with high-sugar cereals to truly attain children — that folks in all probability would not purchase them if their children 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 children. That is why, practically 20 years in the past, the meals trade launched the Youngsters’s Meals and Beverage Promoting 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 children was very prevalent in the USA, and it continues to be prevalent regardless of corporations pledging to do higher,” she says.
The examine is the primary to instantly 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 mother and father to purchase — an idea often called “pester energy.”
And this meals advertising and marketing can even form kids’s long-term preferences for unhealthy merchandise, Taillie says. “We have now good knowledge to indicate that behaviors which might be realized in childhood monitor into maturity,” which may 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 seemed solely at adverts via 2017. He factors to a 2024 examine exhibiting kids’s publicity to cereal adverts on TV programming geared toward children 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 method that’s not mirrored within the Rudd Middle report,” Vary mentioned.
Harris was one of many authors of that 2024 examine. She says most of that drop in promoting to children is because of a decline in TV viewing.
Ads, like children’ 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