How social media fattens kids
Dr Michelle Dickinson, creator of Nanogirl, is a nanotechnologist who is passionate about getting Kiwis hooked on science and engineering. Tweet her your science questions @medickinson
Childhood obesity is increasing rapidly, with the New Zealand Health Survey finding that our childhood rates increased from 8 per cent in 2007 to 12 per cent in 2018.
Research has found strong associations between increases in advertising for non-nutritious foods and rates of childhood obesity, while a new study published in the journal Pediatrics highlighted the power of social-media influencers to impact obesity levels.
Studies have shown that children under the age of 6 cannot distinguish between television programmes and advertising, while those under 8 do not understand advertising’s persuasive intent.
Children’s ability to recall content and jingles from adverts is strong and a single exposure to a commercial is enough for a child to show product preference.
In 2017, one study looked at the amount of junk food advertising that Kiwi kids were exposed to. Wearable camera and GPS units were attached to them to monitor how often and where they saw junk-food marketing. It was found that on average the children were exposed to 27 advertisements per day for unhealthy foods, including fizzy drinks, candy and snack foods. Surprisingly, seven of the adverts were in schools
While commercials during kids’ TV viewing times have been studied in the past, children’s media consumption today increasingly is online. A new form of celebrity — the social-media influencer — is storming the internet.
These influencers prolifically post photographs and videos of themselves during the day, and share their lives online with millions of followers. Children are among those who follow these influencers on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and research has explored these people’s power to change children’s behaviour.
To see if product placement through these channels had any effect on behaviour, researchers showed vlogs (video blogs) of Instagram influencers holding items to 176 children aged between 9 and 11.
One set of children was shown images of the influencer holding nonfood products such as smartphones and shoes, another set was shown images of the influencer with healthy snacks such as fruit and carrots, and the third was shown influencers with unhealthy snacks such as chocolate and cookies.
Within 10 minutes of viewing the influencer images, the children were asked to choose between healthy snacks including carrot sticks and grapes or unhealthy snacks such as sweets and chocolate.
The researchers found that viewing pictures of influencers with unhealthy snacks resulted in children consuming 32 per cent more calories from unhealthy snacks compared with children who saw the non-food products and the healthy-snack images.
The opposite was not true, with pictures of influencers holding healthy snacks having no increase on the amount of healthy snacks eaten. The study shows the potential for influencers within social media to further increase the obesity rates for children through junk-food product placement.
Some countries such as Sweden and Norway ban marketing of junk food to children aged 12 and under. In contrast, in the US there are few legal restrictions on what advertisers can broadcast to them.
New Zealand sits somewhere in the middle, with the self-regulated advertising standards agency having a policy that food advertisements to children should not undermine health and wellbeing. Social-medial influencers, however, are not bound by these rules and can post themselves eating anything without regulation.
Perhaps it’s time to take this seriously and talk about the introduction of a digital-marketing restriction specifically for socialmedia influencers.