Food advertising really works

The ASA said it was concerned about certain food advertising aimed at children. In a circular to marketers, ASA executive director Deline Beukes pointed out that the International Chamber of Commerce issued a document in 2004 titled "A framework for responsible food and beverage communications".

Beukes said the document is regarded by the European Advertising Standards Alliance, of which the ASA is a member, as a basis for Best Practice, and recommends that marketers around the globe adopt the principles in the documents into their codes of advertising practice. This was not done in South Africa as there was no representative body.

However, a report by the South African Medical Research Council raised concerns about rising levels of obesity in South Africa. It recommended a ban on food advertising to children. At the time, experts were divided as to whether food advertising really made any difference to obesity levels.

Now, some three years later, the journal Health Psychology published by the American Psychological Association cites a Yale University study of seven- to eleven-year-old children which found that 45% of them ate more snack food while watching a cartoon that included food commercials than those children who watched the same cartoon with non-food commercials.

According to the study, from only a half hour of television viewing a day, the increase in snacking caused by food advertising would lead to a weight gain of nearly 10 pounds a year, unless mitigated by reduced consumption of other foods or increased physical activity.

The researchers also found that adult participants exposed to unhealthy food advertisements in TV programming ate significantly more than those who saw ads with a nutrition or healthy food message. The Yale report said these effects persisted after the television viewing.

In the experiments with both children and adults, food advertising increased eating for all available foods, even foods that were not specifically presented in the advertisements.

Jennifer Harris, PhD, Director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Centre for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, concludes: "This research shows a direct link between television food advertising and calories consumed by adults and children. Food advertising triggers automatic eating, regardless of hunger."

So, food advertising works. Should marketers - or parents - be more responsible?

For more information, visit http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=6770