Our children are bombarded by ads for junk food when online

ONLINE data-mining tactics are being exploited by junk food companies to sell high-calorie treats to Irish children on platforms such as Snapchat, obesity experts claim.

The strategy of Cambridge Analytica involved a personality quiz which accessed Facebook users’ data and was allegedly used to help Donald Trump win the US presidential election.

However, obesity experts claimed the makers of sugary high-fat foods have been similar using “micro-targeting tactics” against children for years.

“Junk food marketing involves the world’s best marketing brains in the world’s biggest agencies relentlessly targeting children, who we know are way

more susceptive to advertising, every single day,” Chris Macey of the Irish Heart Foundation told the Oireachtas Youth Affairs Committee.

The committee was told how one 13-year-old boy attending the obesity clinic in Temple St Hospital is 23 stone in weight and his main social interaction is playing online games.

There are 100,000 children who are overweight and obese in the country, and the problem is getting worse among the least well off.

Mr Macey said the link between marketing of unhealthy food and child obesity had been proved conclusively and this led to regulation of ads in the broadcast media.

But this has “led to an explosion in unregulated digital marking that is more personalised, effective and therefore more potentially damaging”, he warned.

Children are being “pestered relentlessly in school, at home, even in their bedrooms through their smartphones,” he warned.

“It is called ‘brand in the hand’ and it gives marketers constant access to children.”

They draw in children with fun, humour, sports stars and celebrities by harvesting information about the youngster’s friends, hobbies, activities and location.

Dr Donal O’Shea, who is now clinical lead for the country’s anti-obesity strategy, said: “This is our chance to begin to make a difference.”

The manner in which junk food companies and sugary drinks companies entice children must be tackled, he added.

Dr O’Shea (inset) singled out Snapchat as a platform which children are particularly targeted by sweet-treat ads.

Asked his view of the sponsorship of parents’ accommodation by Ronald McDonald House in the new national children’s hospital, he said it amounted to “product placement”.

He cautioned: “Product placement is now these companies’ work.”

In his view, it would be akin to having an alcohol company sponsor a hospital liver unit, he said.

“It will be seen as such in 30 years’ time,” he told the committee.