Keep Junk-Food Marketing from Your Child

Is it any wonder parents have a hard time getting kids to eat healthfully? Fast-food restaurants abound. Soft drink vending machines line school hallways. SpongeBob SquarePants, Disney Princesses, and other characters are on the packages of sugary cereals, fruit-flavored snacks, and other junk food. Though most parents try to feed their children healthy foods, their efforts are all too often undermined by an onslaught of food marketing that encourages kids to eat fatty, sugary, and salty foods.

If all that marketing encouraged children to eat fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, it would be helpful. Unfortunately, there is a huge difference between what parents tell their children is healthy to eat and what companies market as desirable to eat. Almost all of the foods marketed to children are fast foods, chips, sugary drinks, candy, sugary cereals, and other low-nutrition foods.

The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) recently concluded, “Marketing works,” and found that, “the dominant focus of food and beverage marketing to children and youth is for products high in calories and low in nutrients, and this is sharply out of balance with healthful diets.” The report found that food marketing affects children’s food choices, what they like to eat, what they ask their parents to purchase, their diets, and their health. Also, watching television with advertising is linked with childhood obesity.

Parents, of course, bear the primary responsibility for what their children eat. However, food and television companies make it hard for parents to do their job. Companies have skills, market research, cartoon characters, and aggressive, sophisticated marketing techniques to help them get into children's heads, manipulate their food choices, and prompt them to pester their parents to purchase junk food. If only I could get Shrek to come to dinner and encourage my daughter to eat her zucchini!

Here are 10 ways to help your child resist food marketing and eat more healthfully. Some are personal actions. Others are broader—designed to get companies to market food to children more responsibly and prevent them from undermining parents’ efforts to feed our children healthfully.

1. Talk with your kids about food marketing
Help your child understand that marketing is intended to sell them something. Discuss the ways that ads persuade them to want a food, such as using their favorite TV show characters, contests, and toy giveaways. Talk to them about why healthy eating is important and why the foods that are marketed to them are not healthful. Go on-line with your kids to explore www.SmartMouth.org from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which helps kids to recognize and resist slick marketing techniques.

2. Ask companies not to market junk food to your children
Write or call food and television companies to let them know that, as a parent, you don’t want them to market junk food to your child and encourage them to market healthy choices. Start by joining other parents to urge Nickelodeon to market food more responsibly to children. (You can find a model letter at: http://takeaction.cspinet.org/campaign/KidVidMA.)

3. Do your own “marketing” of healthy foods
You can make healthy food fun for kids in countless ways. Make water and low-fat milk more appealing by serving them in fun cups with curvy straws. Buy dishes decorated with your children’s favorite characters for serving healthy snacks such as vegetables with low-fat dressing, cut fruit, or low-fat yogurt with fresh fruit. Wash and place a small plastic toy (big enough that it is not a choking hazard) at the bottom of your child’s bowl of a healthy cereal like Cheerios, Raisin Bran, or Shredded Wheat. Let your kids help to plan your week’s meals and engage them in helping to cook healthy dinners or packing healthy lunches. (See http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/school_lunch_tips.pdf for tips for packing a healthy school lunch.)

4. Shop strategically
Establish clear shopping rules that work for your family and stick to them. For example, allow your child to pick out just one food item that is less nutritious during each shopping trip. If a child knows what is expected and agrees to it beforehand, she is less likely to be upset in the store when you say ‘no’ to a request. In the grocery store, let kids enjoy looking at packages with their favorite character, but then return the box to the shelf before you get to the checkout counter. Also, involve your children in choosing healthy foods. Let them help choose which fruits and vegetables or which shape of whole wheat pasta to purchase.

5. Help get junk food out of schools
Send a letter encouraging your U.S. Senators and congressional Representative to support the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act. (You can find a model letter at: http://takeaction.cspinet.org/campaign/SchoolFoodsBill.) The bill would require the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to update its nutrition standards for foods and beverages sold out of vending machines, school stores, and other venues at schools throughout the school day to address portion sizes, fat, salt, sugars, and other nutritional problems in children’s diets.

6. Serve healthy snacks
Serving healthy snacks to children is important to providing good nutrition and supporting lifelong healthy eating habits. Most of the snacks served to children should be fruits and vegetables, since most kids do not eat the recommended four cups of fruits and vegetables each day. Try lots of different fruits and vegetables and prepare them in various ways to find out what your kids like best. Put out fruits and vegetables while you’re preparing dinner or at other times you think your children will be hungry. For other healthy snack ideas, visit: http://www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy/healthy_school_snacks.pdf.

7. Implement a one-treat-a-day rule
Treats are fine but should be an occasional part of the diet rather than eaten at every meal. Let kids choose which treat they would like and at which meal or snack time they’d like to eat it. Treats include foods like donuts, soda, cookies, French fries, chips, candy, juice “drinks,” ice cream, and other high-sugar, high-fat, high-calorie or low-nutrition foods. Remind your child—if he has super-chocolaty cereal for breakfast, he is giving up the chance to have a cookie at lunch or dessert after dinner.

8. Support healthy eating campaigns
Send a letter encouraging your U.S. Senators and congressional Representative to support expanding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) and state health departments’ programs and campaigns to promote healthy eating and physical activity to balance the pressures to eat low-nutrition foods (find a model letter at: http://takeaction.cspinet.org/campaign/cdcfunding).

9. Limit screen time
Television, video games, and the Internet market low-nutrition foods to children. Limit your child’s exposure to these messages by limiting the time spent in front of screens. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than two hours of television and other screen time a day (http://www.aap.org/healthtopics/mediause.cfm).

10. Join your (or start a) school wellness committee
Children eat about a third to a half of their calories at school. You can have a say in what makes up those calories by joining your school’s wellness committee. School wellness committees are developing school nutrition and physical activity policies. Your school’s policy could help to improve the nutritional quality and kid appeal of school lunches, stop the use of junk food as a reward for student achievement or good behavior, and ensure kids have opportunities for physical activity through recess, physical education, and after-school programs.

For more information about food marketing to children and how to join other parents in efforts to loosen marketers’ grip on your children’s eating habits, go to: http://www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy/.