Selling Crap to Kids, Part 12

In his New York Times piece, “Why Your New Year’s Diet Is Doomed,” Mark Bittman wrote,

The interactions among calorie intake, exercise, fat accumulation, insulin resistance and genetic background, along with other environmental factors that cause diet-related diseases (such as stress and generational poverty), are variable and complicated.

In other words, and not surprisingly, this problem is and always will be multi-factorial, and thus not amenable to any facile solution. Still, it is always possible that some factors weigh more heavily than others, and in this case, the factor known as ultra-processing was recognized as quite significant because, “Now, more than half of our total calories come from ultra-processed foods.”

What does that mean exactly? One apt definition was provided by the Brazilian scientist, Carlos Monteiro, who characterized such foods as containing ingredients that are “never or rarely used in kitchens.” But they are used in factories where, for example, the perceived necessity of a freakishly unnatural, extremely prolonged shelf life is also to blame.

We have seen that researchers easily obtain from children confessions about how they harass their parents, both at home and in public places, to obtain their substances of choice. Of course, these exertions are aided by the cunning strategy employed by grocery stores, of placing the products garnished with pictures of cartoon characters on the lower shelves where children can’t miss them.

We say it, you believe it

Such predatory practices set kids up to fail and obviously contribute to the obesity epidemic, and nobody seems able to do anything about them. Or rather, the people who are able are not willing; while those who are willing are not able.

Many individuals and groups lobbied for stricter rules that would require supermarkets to rearrange their shelves and keep sweets out of children’s sightlines. Even some politicians risked incurring the anger of their corporate overlords by demanding that foods with low nutritional value and high obesity potential be placed on higher shelves.

Unfortunately, studies from the Netherlands indicated that such cosmetic measures are pretty much doomed to futility:

[P]ositioning healthier snacks at the checkout counter, without removing less healthy snacks, did not result in the replacement of less healthy snack purchases with healthier alternatives. To discourage the purchase of less healthy snacks at supermarket checkouts, a total substitution of less healthy with healthier snacks is clearly the most effective.

Clearly, no business is going to hide its highly processed and fattening foods in the back room. Those products will remain out where the people who want them can easily find them. And just offering a healthful alternative next to the crappy stuff does not inspire people to choose the healthful alternative.

The only way to stop customers from buying worthless substances posing as food is to not even offer it for sale. In which case, most people will just go to a different store whose products are more to their liking.

How low can you go?

Over in the United Kingdom, there are some standards in place regarding what may be publicly said about food and drink, in places where young folks might hear. One year ago, researchers from the University of Chicago looked at a bunch of Instagram posts made by the “beautiful people” and applied those standards to what they saw:

They found 87 percent of celebrity accounts analyzed received an unhealthy overall food nutrition score, with 89.5 per cent receiving the same result for beverages.

These messages, in the main, were not obviously paid-for advertisements, but allegedly spontaneous and sincere remarks the famous folk just happened to make in the course of living their everyday lives. Many of those remarks did and do concern alcohol, which is nobody’s idea of a healthful influence (and which contributes to obesity both by containing calories and by corrupting people’s judgment about what they ought to be eating).

And in the food category, it comes as no surprise to learn that those observations tend overwhelmingly to concern snacks and sweets. Also, this type of message, which is perceived by fans as authentic and credible, draws more reactions or “engagement,” which in turn rewards the celebrities who regard attention as a form of payment.

Of course, some of them also make millions of dollars for a single post, but shhhh! We are supposed to pretend we don’t know that.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Why Your New Year’s Diet Is Doomed,” NYTimes.com, 01/09/21
Source: “Can Healthy Checkout Counters Improve Food Purchases? Two Real-Life Experiments in Dutch Supermarkets,” NIH.gov, 11/19/20
Source: “Are influencers making our children FAT?,” DailyMail.co.uk, 01/12/22
Source: “20 of Instagram’s Highest Paid Stars in 2024,” InfluencerMarketingHub.com, 01/30/24
Image by balu/CC BY 2.0 DEED

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 11

As the 20-teens decade progressed, conditions grew worse in the realm of celebrity endorsements. A study from New York University’s School of Medicine zeroed in on the sick relationship between the sports industry and the junk food industry.

Journalist Megan Sheets summarized it thusly:

More than three quarters of food products and half of beverages sponsored by the leagues most popular among American children are unhealthy… The findings revealed that 76 percent of food products are unhealthy and 52.4 percent of beverages are sugar sweetened across all of the sports-organization sponsored advertisements. Little League had the third-most unhealthy sponsorships.

Increasingly, individual athletes were blamed and shamed for making money from this unholy alliance. A study published in Pediatrics demonstrated that:

Social-media “influencers” can drive kids to consume unhealthy foods… But that clout disappears when it comes to their promoting healthy foods… [S]eeing influencers promote healthy snacks didn’t significantly move the needle on food intake.

The United Kingdom’s University of Cambridge published a study which indicated that setting a limit on the hours when TV ads directed at children could be shown, would make a “meaningful contribution” toward reducing childhood obesity. Dr. Oliver Mytton told the press,

Our analysis shows that introducing a 9 PM watershed on unhealthy TV food advertising can make a valuable contribution to protecting the future health of all children in the UK… However, children now consume media from a range of sources, and increasingly from online and on-demand services… [I]t is important l to ensure that this advertising doesn’t just move to the 9-10pm slot and to online services.

A noble ambition, but one doomed from its inception because obviously, the trend would only continue in one direction, toward 24 hours per day of entertainment financed by ads for everything awful.

The year 2021 began with a New York Times piece by Mark Bittman pessimistically titled “Why Your New Year’s Diet Is Doomed.” He placed the blame on “the Big Food marketers that sell you that junk” to the tune of $14 billion (with a B) spent on advertising per year, and then generously extended the shame to “politicians who enable them.” Why? Because government serves “the interests of agribusiness, food processors, marketers and retailers.”

In relation to this, Bittman helpfully pointed out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention work with a budget of less than $1 billion per year to prevent disease and promote health. For the mathematically challenged, that means the promoters of disease and preventers of health were spending 14 times as much. It’s all about money, in more ways than one.

The primary determinant of the quality of diet is income, not ignorance, intelligence or will. With 12 percent of Americans going hungry, and millions of households with children uncertain that they’ll be able to feed their kids, the “choice” is often between eating processed food and not eating at all.

Sabrina Sanchez wrote those words in the middle of 2021, by which time COVID-19 had become a factor to be reckoned with. A 72-page report was published showing that “brands and platforms including McDonald’s, Unilever, Facebook and Twitch use technology-driven marketing tactics to sell high-sugar and high-sodium products to kids, leading to obesity.”

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, warned that manufacturers had built “arsenals of data profiling services” using artificial intelligence and machine learning. The purpose of these constructs was to predict the most effective way to advertise, and then to make sure that the predictions came true. Chester says,

In 2020, children between the ages of 6 to 8 years-old cited McDonald’s as their number-one favorite brand, followed by YouTube, Oreo and M&Ms, according to youth market researchers Smarty Pants. Minors ages 9 to17 years-old cited YouTube first, followed by Oreo, Hershey’s, Cheetos and Doritos among the top 10.

The issue was raised that such marketing machinations could be violating the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. Advocacy groups tried their best, but realistically, obtaining protection via child privacy legislation never stood a chance.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Sports leagues blamed for fueling childhood obesity as 76% of teams promote junk food and soda,” DailyMail.co.uk, 03/26/18
Source: “How social-media influencers are making your kids fat,” NYPost.com, 03/05/19
Source: “Television advertising limits can reduce childhood obesity, study concludes,” ScienceDaily.com, 10/13/20
Source: “Why Your New Year’s Diet Is Doomed,” NYTimes.com, 01/09/21
Source: “Fast food and soft drink advertising contributes to childhood obesity,” CampaignLive.com, 05/12/21
Image by Tony Alter/CC BY 2.0 DEED