Selling Crap to Kids, Part 10

Suppose that a prominent medical journal published a review paid for by Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hershey’s, Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, and Monsanto, and partly authored by “a member of the scientific advisory board of Tate & Lyle, one of the world’s largest suppliers of high-fructose corn syrup” — which actually happened in 2016. What would a person expect that article to say? Well, if they guessed that it would say sugar is just fine and dandy, and all the unrealistically alarmist warnings against sugar are based on flimsy evidence — they would be correct.

As soon as Annals of Internal Medicine hit the streets, the backlash flared up, and plenty of health experts pointed out that the patron who put up the money for this “news,” the International Life Sciences Institute, was a very biased, partial, and subjective tool of the industry. For its part, the poor, misunderstood industry, especially the junk food contingent, claimed to only want the development of “trustworthy guidelines on sugar intake.”

This was all part of a larger strategy by which the industry endeavored to recruit as many bent academics as possible to volubly cheer for Team Sugar. Even way back in the 60s, the same deceptive voices had been hired to put a halo around sugar and cast all blame on saturated fat.

So in 2016, the effort was still going strong, when “the Associated Press reported in June that food companies paid for studies that claimed candy-eating children weigh less.” In its turn, the new shocking paper was characterized as “reminiscent of tactics once used by the tobacco industry, which for decades enlisted scientists to become ‘merchants of doubt’ about the health hazards of smoking.”

Dr. Dean Schillinger, internal medicine specialist at San Francisco General Hospital, accused the industry of “hijacking the scientific process in a disingenuous way to sow doubt and jeopardize public health.” Many other experts joined in the condemnation. Journalist Anahad O’Connor reported,

“This comes right out of the tobacco industry’s playbook: cast doubt on the science,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University who studies conflicts of interest in nutrition research. “This is a classic example of how industry funding biases opinion. It’s shameful.”

In the following year, California toughened up rules that had been in effect for a decade, against soft drinks and foods high in fat and sugar being available in school. Now, the education system also banned advertising for such products in any form, and tossed out some of the sneaky workarounds that the industry had devised to avoid the rules. Journalist Cameron St. Germain wrote,

[T]he bill includes restrictions on corporate incentive programs such as the Box Tops for Education program, which rewards schools for collecting box tops clipped from specially marked products. The products, however, tend to be processed foods like cereals, snack bars, cookies, frozen pizzas, and other foods full of added sugar, salt, and fat… As this type of program constitutes a type of in-school advertising, it has been banned as part of the new bill.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Study Tied to Food Industry Tries to Discredit Sugar Guidelines,” NYTimes.com, 12/19/16
Source: “California Targets Childhood Obesity with New Advertisement Regulations,” NYCFoodPolicy.org, 11/21/17
Images by Ricardo Liberato, Sage Ross, Aidan Jones/CC BY-SA 2.0

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 9

A 2016 study revealed that children “as young as 2 years old could recognize food and beverage characters…” and for several years they are deeply impressionable. Children under the age of eight were found to be extremely susceptible to outside influence, like advertising, for instance, because “the brain is most open to priming.”

Attributed to various sources is a centuries-old maxim. One authority says,

Educationalists should take the hint from the dictum of Ignatius Loyola… “Give me a child until he is 7, and I will give you the man.”

Throughout the decade, the battle for children’s minds and hearts raged on. While some manufacturers made the effort to appear nobly concerned, others just went with the flow, and got away with whatever chicanery they could. But while a cartoon character might captivate a child, more is required to snag the attention of teenagers.

Celebrities had already been taking some flak for endorsing junk food. A study revealed what anyone with half a wit realized anyway: “Most of the foods and beverages endorsed by celebrities are unhealthy.”

The industry was so enamored of capturing young minds that it spent $2 billion per year on the art and science of doing that. Not surprisingly, the most fervent employers of media stars were PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Red Bull. Also generating minimal shock, this news was announced:

Very few celebrities were endorsing healthy products, and not one popular TV, film, or music star was featured in ads for fruits, vegetables, or whole grain products.

But never fear… there is always a place for the beautifully famous, in the world of junk food marketing. Just like there is always a place for little kids in the media marketing landscape. The junk food advertising industry discovered the pester-power factor, utilizing both electronic screens and in-store displays to inform children exactly what they ought to desire, and motivating behavior that parents don’t love, and neither does the general public.

Back in the day

Most media did not used to be on-demand. There were three TV networks, and you watched what they broadcast, on their schedule. Certain types of programming clustered around certain time slots, and Saturday morning was cartoon heaven.

In 2016, Gwendolyn Wu wrote on Medium.com:

[T]wo separate studies published last week suggest that the constant barrage of junk food advertisements on television is a driving factor behind rising childhood obesity levels…

For one study […] researchers from McMaster University in Canada conducted randomized trials and found that children who saw commercials for junk foods consumed more unhealthy foods than healthy ones…

Those findings are supported by a study [that] analyzed kids’ responses to junk food commercials on TV and found that children commonly ask their parents to purchase items that they see on screen.

The public talked about setting boundaries, and if necessary, laying down some laws. Marketing should be a grown-up conversation, with the kids left out of it. Some very worried adults pointed out that advertising to children is a sort of gradual brainwashing to get what the adult wants, a process that in another context is called grooming.

Meanwhile, young cartoon aficionados were absorbing an average of five junk-food commercials per hour. The children under scrutiny reported that, among other things, the ads made them think of nutritionally null snacks, when they would not ordinarily have done so.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Silly rabbit! Junk food ads contribute to childhood obesity, study says,” PBS.org, 07/05/16
Source: “Give me a child…,” NewScientist.com, 12/19/06
Source: “Study: 80% of Celebrity Endorsements Are for Junk Foods,” EurWeb.com, 07/05/16
Source: “Kids Admit Commercials Make Them Pester Parents for Junk Food,” Medium.com, 07/11/16
Image by Leonid Mamchenkov/CC BY 2.0 DEED

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 8

We are up to Part 8 of this series already, and it’s only 2015. In February of that year, YouTube made bold moves that were characterized by complaints to the Federal Trade Commission as “deceiving kids by mixing ads and content without clear delineations,” a situation described for WIRED by Julia Greenberg.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. What was supposed to happen was that the special app would provide safer and easier access to “family-friendly videos, channels, and educational clips.” Yet somehow, this innocent gateway to safe, uncontroversial children’s programming ended up being perceived by a coalition of 10 consumer groups as a font of unfair and deceptive marketing that targeted children, rather than serving them. Rules, the critics charged, were being violated, and parents were being misled.

The thing is, although the rules for broadcast television were pretty strict, the internet was a different matter altogether. By its very nature, advertising over the World Wide Web is much more mutable and inconsistent, so it is not so easy to make rules that stick. A discrete, established channel like Nickelodeon was not allowed to have its programs write the commercials, or let show hosts peddle the merch, and the amount of advertising per hour was limited. But YouTube was the Wild West.

In July of that year, several “marketing icons” including Ronald McDonald, the Trix Rabbit and Sour Patch Kids were named as contributors to the childhood obesity epidemic. For PBS, Laura Strum explained the implications of a new study:

The investigation pooled data from 29 randomized trials involving 6,000 children to examine how exposure to marketing for high-calorie and sugary foods […] increased a child’s short-term desire for these items. The study found that kids consumed 30 more calories when exposed to just four minutes of junk food advertising relative to control groups.

McMaster University’s Dr. Bradley Johnston opined, “If we were to ban TV ads for bad fats, sugars and salts we could potentially reduce [the rates of] overweight and obese [children] by 15 and 2.5 percent respectively.”

Incapable of distinctions

But YouTube was able to get away with a bunch of techniques that watchdog groups considered underhanded, like letting popular hosts or beloved characters double as salespersons and being insufficiently obvious about what was advertising versus what was programming. YouTube was pulling off an unacceptable amount of boundary obfuscation. Greenberg wrote,

We adults see sponsored stories right next to news… On YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest we follow people who tout clothes or play with gadgets they’ve been given by sponsors. For adults, the failure to clean up the mix between ads and content doesn’t seem so pressing.

In the opinion of the FCC, because children do not yet have the necessary cognitive skills in place, they are unable to tell the difference between entertainment and advertising, so expecting them to make such fine distinctions is unacceptable.

But although the FCC has jurisdiction over TV, its powers were not considered broad enough to get the job done on the internet, so the FTC with its more comprehensive muscle was asked to step in like the new sheriff in town and clean the place up. YouTube, of course, denied all guilt. Its staunch self-defense included an ostensibly righteous repudiation of classist snobbery. It communicated,

We worked with numerous partners and child advocacy groups when developing YouTube Kids… While we are always open to feedback on ways to improve the app, we were not contacted directly by the signers of this letter and strongly disagree with their contentions, including the suggestion that no free, ad-supported experience for kids will ever be acceptable. We disagree and think that great content shouldn’t be reserved for only those families who can afford it.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Exposing the Murky World of Online Ads Aimed at Kids,” WIRED.com, 04/07/15
Source: “Silly rabbit! Junk food ads contribute to childhood obesity, study says,” PBS.org, 07/05/16
Image by erenkumcuoglu/CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 7

In 2015 celebrities, especially if they worked for Disney, were catching flack for moonlighting in Coca-Cola ads. Journalist Jon Yaneff wrote,

Take for example a recent study published in the June edition of the journal Pediatrics. The study looked at 590 endorsements from 163 different celebrities. Researchers found that 65 celebrities were associated with 57 different food and beverage brands, including low-nutrient and sugar-sweetened drinks.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to ban both straightforward and covert advertising during children’s television shows. They established that pretty close to 100% of the food ads shown amongst highly-rated children’s programming featured junk food, and it wasn’t uncommon for any given child to see 20 such ads in a single day. That’s a lot of propaganda, particularly when poured into an immature mind.

The AAP wanted Congress, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to forbid ads aimed at kids from being shown on TV, cell phones, and the like. In the same way that cigarettes and smoking had been excluded from entertainment movies, they also wanted to ditch the depiction of junk food. Julia Greenberg wrote of the FCC,

By the agency’s rationale, children haven’t developed the cognitive skills to distinguish between ads and content (or even read!). As a result, the FCC has set time limits on the number of ads allowed per hour during children’s programming. It’s also banned TV characters from selling products and prohibits product placement on kid channels and shows.

In another article written at the time, Drucilla Dyess said, “It is estimated that the ban could reduce the rates of overweight children and childhood obesity by as much as 15 to 20 percent.” But then, the Council of Better Businesses looked at the studies used by the AAP to reach its conclusions about the harmfulness of such advertising, and of course found them inadequate to the purpose.

The business groups claimed that the data used to condemn junk food advertising was either outdated, seriously inaccurate to begin with, or both. They claimed that research used flawed methodologies, and that there had been recent product improvements which the industry had not been given credit for. Some TV advertising was curbed, but obesity rates did not decrease, so the industry’s advocates claimed that forbidding ads obviously didn’t do any good. Of course, the other side argued that the children being observed had already been subjected to a ton of junk food ads, and were still responding to years of earlier brainwashing, so a dramatic change could not be expected to show up right away.

Back and forth

But industry representatives maintained that the situation had improved, because the products being advertised to kids were innocuous foods like “yogurt, soup, canned pasta, cereals, and meals with vegetables or fruit, milk or juice.” The child protectors responded by finding authorities who decried every one of those items. But the industry had another argument up its sleeve: leaving ads aside, there were also studies showing that just watching TV alone, without any food ads, also contributed to weight gain.

Furthermore, with or without advertising, just watching screens too close to bedtime had been shown to interfere with children’s sleep patterns, and it had been shown that bad effects on the quality and duration of sleep affected children’s tendency to put on pounds.

Some critics even proposed an extreme position: How about just not advertising to minors, period? After all, it’s not as if every child in America has a paycheck burning a hole in her or his pocket. Of course, that proposition was destined to go nowhere.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Selena Gomez, Madison Pettis Share Birthdays and Endorse Coca-Cola,” FoodsForBetterHealth.com, 08/27/15
Source: “Exposing the Murky World of Online Ads Aimed at Kids,” WIRED.com, 04/07/15
Source: “UPDATED: Will a Ban on Junk Food Ads Curb Childhood Obesity?,” HealthNews.com, 01/27/15
Images by Daniel M Vierdo, Pearl, Quinn Dombrowski/CC BY-SA 2.0

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 6

Early in 2014, Hank Cardello in a Forbes.com article noted how a drugstore chain had sacrificed $2 billion in annual profits by removing cigarettes from its shelves. Apple expunged 6,000 “sexually suggestive apps” from iTunes, and Costco banned firearms from its premises. Some companies discovered that what they lost in immediate income they could make back by the circuitous route of adopting “more socially acceptable products and practices.”

Before anyone could start feeling too warm and fuzzy about all this, the writer added,

[C]ompanies like CVS don’t give up a profitable line of business unless it is in their best long-term financial interest to do so. What CVS did is what I call having a moment of profitable morality.

Over a period of years, Disney theme parks shifted their children’s menus toward the healthier end of the spectrum. French fries were out; carrots were in. Even more surprising…

In 2012 Disney announced that it would no longer run junk food ads on its TV and radio stations, sacrificing a share of this $2 billion market in advertising to children… Disney’s stock price has doubled in the past two years.

Once the “halo effect” had been discovered, some corporations wasted no time “devoting their sharpest minds to figuring which of their products can thrive as the market changes, and de-emphasizing or eliminating the ones that no longer make sense.” But sadly, not enough corporations threw their sharpest minds into the job, and over the ensuing years, the world has seen plenty of examples that have no connection with morality, profitable or otherwise.

At the same time, though, other organizations became more conscious and more conscientious. In Australia, where almost two-thirds of school-age children participate in organized sports, a study published by a sports medicine journal shined a spotlight on the practice of advertising junk food at sports fields and even on the uniforms of young athletes.

By 2014, it was estimated that corporations spent a combined 1.6 billion every year on advertising specifically tailored to children, which achieved spectacular results, especially when imaginary characters were telling the kids what to eat. An interesting detail: The technique worked equally well in persuading them toward either junk food or healthy fare like vegetables.

Around the same time, Cornell University researchers studied the success of various in-store advertising ploys, such as positioning children’s cereal lower on the shelves, where actual children who happened to be shopping with a parent (and were too big to ride in the grocery cart) could more readily see them. It was also discovered that the friendly characters depicted on children’s cereal boxes were designed to make eye contact with their prospective customers, whereas on adult cereal boxes, characters like sports figures did not make eye contact with the viewer, but looked straight ahead.

Apparently, that is the sort of project into which most of the cereal industry’s sharpest minds invested their creative energies.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “CVS and the Rise of Corporate Profitable Morality,” Forbes.com 02/27/14
Source: “Junk food ads taking over kids sport – study,” WordPress.com/,10/06/14
Source: “Me eat vegetable: Cookie Monster wants kids to snack healthier,” TheGuardian.com, 10/04/14
Source: “Warning: Cereal Box Characters Are Stalking The Children,” CBSNews.com, 04/07/14
Images by dancingbarefoot3, Karen, Matthew Sheales/CC BY 2.0

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 5

This sequence of posts is a historical overview of the food industry’s ambitious project of brainwashing children to nag their parents to buy them the worst possible excuses for food. In Part 1, we looked at the good guys’ decades-long effort to ban the advertising of such products on television, while manufacturers continued to ramp up the proportions of sugar and salt in their breakfast offerings.

Meanwhile, the cereal moguls commissioned studies designed to convince everyone that kids simply will not eat cereal unless it is heavily sweetened. And gosh darn it, as much as they wished that they could help reduce the amount of sugar eaten by kids, there was simply nothing they could do. Their hands were tied. Because in commerce, markets are propelled by demand. So it was implied and presumed that if children were denied sugar-laden breakfast food, millions of them would go on hunger strike and starve themselves to death.

Part 2 discussed the efficacy of creating advertisements where the products were endorsed by celebrities or cartoon characters, or celebrity cartoon characters.

For AlterNet, reporter Martha Rosenberg reviewed a study that had been published in the journal Pediatrics, in which children sampled graham crackers with popular cartoon characters on their packages and found that they tasted better than other crackers (identical down to the molecular level) that came in plain wrappers.

The same type of comparison test was run with identical gummy fruit snacks, some packaged in bland anonymity, and others presented in packaging bedecked with — you guessed it — popular cartoon characters. By now, the astute reader will have also guessed that the cartoon-packaged treats actually tasted better! What is more, the degree of preference was not just noticeable but academically defined as significant.

Part 3 of the sequence looked at the technique of promoting basically valueless junk as being somehow healthful. And strangely, although kids don’t care about that sort of thing, it seems that, nevertheless, they are likely to form a positive impression of a product based on ads that claim health benefits.

About a decade ago, matters had advanced to the point where the average American child encountered around 16,000 TV commercials per year, a large proportion of them touting foodstuffs. At the same time, a growing number of adults were philosophically opposed to the tactic of direct-to-child advertising. Some critics asked, “Should they be allowed to show so many of these ads to kids?” while others were like, “Should they be permitted to do this at all, even a little bit?” It was an uphill battle of course.

Part 4 touched on the cultural weirdness of designating children’s food, as separate and distinct from adults’ food. Sure, in the olden days of the human race, there was breast milk; and no doubt a certain amount of maternal pre-chewing of edible plants and flesh for the benefit of kids who didn’t have teeth yet. But children’s food? No such thing. And yet somehow, thousands of generations of young humans survived.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Americans Are Huge: 5 Surprising Reasons Why We May Be Getting Fatter,” AlterNet.org, 03/12/14
Images by Jose Melendez, mliu92, Miguel Pimentel/CC BY-SA 2.0

Start Making Sense

Lately there has been a revival of interest in a subject that many people, regardless of how well-intentioned, have trouble wrapping their heads around: the paradox of obesity and food insecurity. How can they both exist together?

According to government figures,

12.8 percent of American households (17.0 million households) were food insecure in 2022, meaning that they had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their household members because of a lack of resources.

Sadly, what a lot of it boils down to is a survival mode, “Get it while you can” philosophy. When it’s uncertain where the next meal will come from — let alone, next week’s groceries — a person tends to chow down on anything that happens to be available because it might be their last chance for a while.

The language has evolved. Instead of “poor neighborhoods,” we say “under-resourced communities.” Instead of “hunger” we say “food insecurity,” but it all boils down to the same thing, in the words of writer Ann Shovels:

[…] the state where there is limited, inadequate, or unreliable availability or access to obtain nutritionally sufficient and safe foods in socially acceptable ways.

Of course, that definition can be broken down even further. It is against the law, anywhere, to break into an establishment and steal food from the stockroom. But things are a little different in the tourist-friendly part of town, where restaurants feature outdoor seating adjacent to public sidewalks. After the customer has finished and left, it is socially acceptable for hungry people to swipe leftovers from the tables, as long as they aren’t too obnoxious about it.

There are people who depend on street scores for most of their calories, and there are even other people who will considerately leave a partly-eaten lunch on an accessible ledge, rather than stuff it into a trash can because they know this.

Challenges on every side

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) speaks of obesity in terms of the social determinants of health, “the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.” According to the CDC,

Examples of social determinants can be job opportunities and income, access to education, healthcare, transportation, housing, and a safe physical environment, as well as the experience of structural racism.

A lot of factors figure into the ability to obtain food that doesn’t promote obesity. A person with no kids and a car is going to have better access to healthful groceries than a person with five kids and no car, that is for certain.

Now, suppose that a family member is too sick to be left at home alone. If no one else is available to cover for a while, the primary caregiver can’t go shopping. For many Americans, especially since COVID, the answer springs readily to mind: Have the groceries delivered, of course! But delivery of any commodity generally involves an extra charge.

Prosperous people forget that little detail, or maybe never know it in the first place, because their underlings handle such matters. A famous queen of France, when informed that the peasants didn’t have any bread, supposedly retorted, “I don’t see the problem. Just tell them to eat cake.”

To a sensible human, the logical flaw here seems obvious. If the lower class can’t afford plain old bread, they almost certainly can’t afford cake. But well-to-do people are often clueless about the challenges of the under-financed life. They just don’t get it.

All kinds of things can go wrong in families, and even if close friends and neighbors are willing to step up, they often can’t, because they are just as broke as the people they wish they could help.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Understanding the paradox of obesity and food insecurity,” CANR.MSU.edu, 12/22/23
Source: “Is Online Grocery Delivery Worth It?,” RamseySolutions.com, 1/24/23
Image by Michael Coghlan/CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED