Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Childhood obesity over the decades
How does marketing aimed at children negatively affect child development
Increase in childhood obesity essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Childhood obesity over the decades
Children Targeted for Fast Food by Advertisers Over the last few decades, fast food advertisers have realized that targeting the innocent minds of children bring more customers. A senator named Tom Harkin said “Corporate America…spends $12 billion [on advertising aimed at children] because that advertising works brilliantly because it persuades children to demand – to the point of throwing temper tantrums, if necessary – a regular diet of candy, cookies, sugary cereal, sodas, and all manner of junk food”. No matter what parents buy for their children, the children want and are fascinated by the toys that come with buying fast food, so the children persuade their parents to buy the fast food. Advertisers should not be permitted to target children, …show more content…
The children assume that they will become strong, healthy and fit like the models and characters used in the advertisements. For example, “Most advertising promotes unhealthy regular menu items and often takes unfair advantage of young people’s vulnerability to marketing, making it even tougher for parents to raise healthy children.” (Orciari). Food that are marketed and promoted in the advertisement usually contain high sugar, fat and high level sodium. Food industries use young children, cartoon characters, sports and Hollywood celebrities to market their food products. This kind of advertisement encourages children to go to their restaurants and eat the unhealthy food because if they buy that food, they will get toys. These restaurants spend millions dollars on advertisement and are successful in targeting children with that method since most children watch lots of television. There are many methods used in these television advertisements that appeal to children. The marketing of food is affecting the health of the children, as they end up eating unhealthy food which affects …show more content…
“Television was the predominant medium to reach youth, and quick service or fast food restaurants spent $154 million on television advertising aimed at the child demographic.” (Chabot). There are several advertisements related to marketing of foods to children. Some of the selected advertisement from Pepsi, M&M Candy, McDonald Kids Happy Meal, Crispy Cream Donuts, Cereals, Burger King’s Burger and fries and Oreo cookies. Children see this advertisement while watching cable TV and also on YouTube. All these advertisement targeted towards young kids promoting high fat food, soft drinks and other food containing sugar, fat and sodium. That’s why today the Obesity in childhood is a major problem around the world now specifically in developed countries like United States. When child has an excess amount of body fat that is when child’s weight is above the recommended weight based on gender, height and age then this condition is described as obesity. BMI – Body mass index calculation outcome determines when a person is overweight or not. There are many factors that cause obesity, such as genetic if parents are obese, lack of physical activities, unbalanced/unhealthy eating habits that is food with high fat or due to hormonal disorders. As mentioned it might be due to genetic if one of the parents is obese then child is at high risk on obesity compare to the child
This leads to all the issues involving advertising. In an article titled, “Facts About Marketing to Children,” it states, “Advertising directed at children is estimated at over $15 billion annually…” In fact an average youth is exposed to an estimated 5,000 ads annually. This shows that advertisers know that it is easier to convince a child to want their product rather than an adult, and this is why they target children and teens. Also in the article, “$211 Billion and So Much to Buy American Youths, the New Big Spenders,” it talks about how much time youths spend on the internet. 76% of 8-9 year olds spend more than one hour on the internet per day and 91% of 16-17 year olds spend more than one hour on the internet each day. Since the average amount of ads seen per day is 500 ads, in just one hour there are about 20 ads seen by children. This comes down to that the more ads that youths see, the higher the risk of all the problems ads
Obesity in the United States, which the media has labeled a national crisis, has also been connected to poverty rates. Big fast food industry’s target poor communities, and spend millions of dollars each year to create advertising that appeals to these specific areas. These industry’s also target naïve children when advertising because they know that eating habits developed in childhood are usually carried into adulthood. Children who are exposed to television advertisements for unhealthy food and who are not educated well enough on good nutrition will grow up and feed their families the same unhealthy foods they ate as kids. A big way fast food giants are able to make certain young people have access to unhealthy food is by strategically placing franchises in close proximity to schools. They will often place three times as many outlets within walking distance of schools than in areas where there are no schools nearby. The way fast food advertising is targeted towards children is very alarming considering how important good nutrition is for young people and how a child’s eating habits can affect their growth and
Any agency that uses children for marketing schemes spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year worldwide persuading and manipulating consumer’s lifestyles that lead to overindulgence and squandering. Three articles uncover a social problem that advertising companies need to report about. In his research piece “Kid Kustomers” Eric Schlosser considers the reasons for the number of parents that allow their children to consume harmful foods such as ‘McDonalds’. McDonalds is food that is meant to be fast and not meant to be a regular diet. Advertising exploits children’s needs for the wealth of their enterprise, creating false solutions, covering facts about their food and deceiving children’s insecurities.
Fast food restaurants such as Burger King and McDonald’s, create advertisements where it urges people to consume their product. For example Mcdonald’s created a product where you can get two items such as a mcdouble and a medium fries for three dollars. According to “The battle against fast food begins at home”, by Daniel Weintraub, it shows how companies are intriguing their customers. “ The center blames the problem on the increasing consumption of fast food and soft drinks, larger portion sizes in restaurants and the amount of available on school campuses”(1).For the most part, the Center for Public Health believes that fast food companies are the problem for health
From cartoon and sports to having the toys in meals in a huge display and lowered. There are even advertisements that trick adults. They are convincing, but it can all be stopped with just simple reminders that it’s not real or it’s not good to have this in your body. These reminders can help America become less obese and more health conscious and can even affect the way children think as they grow up surrounded by them. The United States is slowly increasing its awareness of the condition that it is in by companies improving foods and people paying more attention to the nutrition’s in foods. Also many food companies have died down on television advertising for kids, but it is still found in other expressed ways. While it is okay to advertise the question of is it okay to advertise to children is still not answered. It all depends on the consumers what is right and wrong and how to approach each product. Obesity from these products can be cured by hard exercise, but this is not recommended for children. It is more efficient for children to just eat healthy as they are still growing each day. So the next time an ad pops up on the screen and that little girl or boy is focused on it try to explain to them by reading the ingredients or the nutrition label why they should not eat it often. With small steps like these children
Although inherited conditions have been linked to childhood obesity, they are rare. However it has been noted that children with obese or overweight parents are more than likely to be obese themselves, the reason for this as described by Heaton-Harris (2007) is because of the length of time it takes to break a bad habit. Unless the parents are correctly informed of healthy diets themselves the problem will continue from an ill-informed childhood into adult hood. Other probable causes are numerous ones. Fast food and processed foods becoming more read...
According to “Burger Battles” from the Weekly Reader, obesity is defined as a person whose weight is 20 percent higher than recommended for their height (Burger Battles 1). When this condition begins to affect children lives, it is then known as childhood obesity. Within the United States of America, around 15 percent of children are considered to be obese (Holguin 3). Increasing tremendously, this outbreak has actually tripled in the amount of obese teen and doubled in children up to the age of thirteen (Burger Battles 2). One of the factors that is usually overlooked in the cause for obesity is the role of television. Not only does it reduce the amount of physical activity, the advertisements and commercials are targeting innocent viewers. In a survey completed by Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, the average child watches nearly 19 hours and 40 minutes of television a week (Ruskin 2). With that amount of time spent watching television, advertisements for fast food will be entering the children’s minds.
...product toward children promising those children toys and gifts and you can even find inside some of those fast food restaurants games that attract children. Because of what they are doing one in six children are obese, the parents must be blamed but still the fast food industries are the ones who are selling that product and marketing it toward those children.
One way that fast food effects obesity is by advertising their products to children (Miller). In her article Food Advertising Contributes to Obesity, Patti Miller explains that the fast food companies are targeting kids and teenagers by advertising on television. The fast food advertisements are promoting unhealthy products as acceptable food which influences children to choose those meals. The American Psychological Association, an organization focused on improving the lives of individuals, expressed that with the exposure of different fast food commercials, children request to purchase these unhealthy products and cause the parents to be influenced by these requests. This concludes the idea that once children are encouraged by the commercials, they opt to consume the fast food advertised on television. Today, fast food companies are even advertising through schools by offering pizzas and burgers as school lunches, which consequently becomes a daily meal for children and teenagers to consume (Wadden, Brownell,
Worcester Polytechnic Institution. "Fast Food Marketing to Children." Public Health Communication. (2007). http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-082107-231740/unrestricted/Appendix_1.pdf (accessed February 17, 2014).
One of them being that the food advertised is unhealthy. “The mechanism of effect of media exposure on obesity may also operate through the extensive advertising messages for unhealthy foods targeted at children.” (Agarwal, Dhanasekaran) The food advertising geared towards children makes them develop unhealthy eating habits, and choices. The advertisements are usually advertising unhealthy foods, not healthy ones.
Even though there is no evidence that it is directly connected to obesity rates, it is still important for many reasons. The first reason many marketers believe that advertising directly to children is unethical especially since children can easily manipulated using different advertising techniques such as using celebrities and popular cartoon characters to tell the children to buy products. Also, children don’t recognize the exaggeration in the commercials that are commonly used to create an advertising buzz or catch phrase. One example to that situation is the Red Bull commercials. Red Bull usually use cartoon figures in their commercial and have a common theme in their commercial, which is when you drink Red Bull, it gives you wings. They actually use the slogan “Red Bull Gives you wings” in all of their advertising campaigns. Of course if an adult see that commercial, they would understand that it is a false claim and it is used just for fun. While on the hand, if children see that commercial, it is most likely that they would believe that drinking Red Bull would actually give them wings. Another reason on why they should band Food Advertising to children is that food consumption of people is actually developed since childhood. There is a study conducted by the Columbia university about food consumption patterns and their found out that the food that children usually consume during their childhood
Most broadcasting commercials which are aiming at children usually focus on sweets and fast food, which are the main causes of overweight and some other illnesses. In fact, obesity alone is very dangerous as it can lead into many different other sicknesses like asthma, liver disease, diabetes types I and diabetes type II and also some social problem such as being harassed and decreasing in self-respect (Boyland and Whalen 2015). As an
Junk foods commercials are a majority of what we see on television. The Kaiser Family Foundation study stated that “Children age eight to twelve see an average of twenty-one ads each day for candy, snacks, cereal, and fast food--more than 7,600 a year” (Thomas). For example, soda pop is one junk food that is very harmful to our body but we see Coke commercials promoting to children that it is a wonderful thing to “share a coke.” Coke shows people smiling and having a great time with friends which leads children to believe soda pop will make them happy and social. These ironic ads give children the wrong message about what they should consume.
McGinnis, J. Michael., Jennifer Appleton. Gootman, and Vivica I. Kraak. Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity? Washington, D.C.: National Academies, 2006. Print.