Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Food Advertising on Children’s Knowledge about and Preferences for Healthful Food

Abstract

To understand the rising prevalence of childhood obesity in affluent societies, it is necessary to take into account the growing obesity infrastructure, which over past decades has developed into an obesogenic environment. This study examines the effects of one of the constituent factors of consumer societies and a potential contributory factor to childhood obesity: commercial food communication targeted to children. Specifically, it investigates the impact of TV advertising on children's food knowledge and food preferences and correlates these findings with their weight status. Evaluations of traditional information- and education-based interventions suggest that they may not sustainably change food patterns. Based on prior consumer research, we propose five hypotheses, which we then test using a subsample from the IDEFICS study, a large-scale pan-European intervention study on childhood obesity. The results indicate that advertising has divergent effects on children's food knowledge and preferences and that food knowledge is unrelated to food preferences. This finding has important implications for both future research and public policy.

The role of the home environment in sugar-sweetened beverage intake among northern Mexican adolescents: a qualitative study

“…This could represent an obstacle when trying to reduce SSB intake in Mexican households as cultural beliefs and traditions might be difficult to change. It might also be the case that accompanying meals with SSBs is influenced by the marketing and globalization of the western diet, where accompanying certain (fast) foods with SSBs is presented as common practice (Larson and Story 2009;Reisch et al 2013). Future interventions need to consider these factors in their design and identify ways to modify cultural norms and practices to reduce the intake of SSBs in adolescents.…”

Measuring the Impact of Advertisement on Children Diet Choice in the Pediatric Population.

“…The use of paired images of similar products, as in this study, was also employed by Reisch et al [19], who showed 10 pairs of similar food products for which children expressed preferences by assigning an image of a smiley or sad face, indicative of desired or undesired products. It was also used with good internal and external validity by Kopelman et al [34], who used paired cards with images of food products to check whether children exposed to advertisements were able to recognize logos and brands.…”

“…In almost all studies performing similar experiments, children have been exposed to a greater number of advertising messages and the outcome has been measured with a larger set of product pairs, but a methodological recommendation is mentioned to simplify the experimental procedure [19,25,33]. For this reason, in this paper it was decided to limit the pairs of products to four, in order to reduce the children's exposure to commercial messages, given their young age.…”

“…However, few studies have used experimental methodologies [12,18,19] to measure the causal relationship that might be established between exposure to advertisements and the consumption preferences of children; some have focused on measuring children's short-term preferences after controlled exposure [20][21][22][23][24]. In this line of work, the study by Borzekowski and Robinson [25] stands out.…”

Policy challenges of food advertisements from the viewpoints of Stakeholders: A qualitative study

“…Unhealthy dietary habits, for example, switching from healthy traditional foods to fast foods, which contain high amounts of fat and sodium and low fiber, are the key driver behind developing noncommunicable diseases. As there is a relationship between food advertising and food choices, by modifying people's habits and food choices (Reisch et al, 2013).…”