Nag Me Not
In 2000 the Canadian Medical Association Journal reported that children are increasingly choosing to watch TV, surf the Internet, and play video games instead of staying active with sports and outdoor play. Today the average Canadian child sits in front of a screen three to five hours a day.
The problem is that while watching TV and surfing the Internet, kids are inundated with commercials and banner ads promoting high-calorie convenience and fast foods. Thin and happy children are portrayed in ads eating platefuls of fattening foods, but when normal viewers eat the same way, they take in much more energy than their inactive bodies can burn off.
As a result levels of obesity and cardiovascular disease risk factors in children are higher than ever before. According to the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, which followed children from 1994 to 1998, the prevalence of obesity in children tripled over that period, from 5 percent to 16.6 percent of boys and from 5 percent to 14.6 percent of girls. (Children who weigh 20 percent more than the norm for their age and height are considered obese.) In 1998 one-third of Canadian children aged 2 to 11 were considered overweight.
Irresistible Marketing
It’s easy to understand why. Our children’s lives are awash in food marketing. “Along with toy ads, food ads account for most of the marketing that targets kids,” says Dr. Susan Linn in Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (New Press, 2004). Linn, a Harvard Medical School expert and cofounder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (commercialfreechildhood.org), recently videotaped six hours of programming on a children’s network one Sunday afternoon. Reviewing the tapes, she counted 40 food commercials, or about one every nine minutes. Almost all of these were for foods high in calories, fat, salt, and/or sugar.
“These advertisements make sugary and high-fat foods irresistible to children,” says Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation (Viking, 2004). “[They] undermine parents’ attempts to control their children’s diets.”
Hard to Say No
Many of the foods that are marketed to children are foods parents would never eat themselves, let alone feed to their children. But many parents find it hard to uphold their personal health values in the face of corporate advertising. Convenience food manufacturers have enlisted the best psychologists and market researchers available to sell to kids. That’s because kids aged 12 and under offer easy access to the $500 billion market their parents represented in 2000, as determined by marketing expert James McNeal. Parents find themselves in a daily battle to repel market forces and teach their kids what’s healthy and what’s not.
“The industry spin is that it’s up to parents to protect children from marketing. But how can one family combat a $12 billion industry?” asks Linn.
Some Successful Strategies
If you are concerned about how many convenience and fast foods your children are nagging you to buy for them, it’s time to make a change. Many teenagers and pre-teens are already sufficiently aware that they can choose not to eat these foods. Morgan Spurlock’s film Super Size Me (2004) helped educate older kids about the health consequences of convenience and fast foods. Younger children also need help to understand why you don’t want them to eat these high-fat, empty calorie foods.
One good strategy is to tell them that obesity is not a cosmetic issue. It’s associated with heart disease, stroke, and other weight-related health problems. According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “Among overweight children between 5 and 10 years of age, 60 percent already have at least one cardiovascular disease risk factor, such as elevated blood lipids, blood pressure, or insulin levels that can lead to atherosclerosis, hypertension, and diabetes in adulthood.”Here are a few other strategies to help you work against corporate marketers and eliminate the “nag factor.”
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