‘Cereal ads affect US kids’ diets’

CHILDREN’S exposure to TV adverts about highsugar cereals influences their food intake, which increases their health risks for obesity as well as cancers, a study warns.

The research, led by a team from the Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the US, showed that high-sugar cereals are heavily promoted during programmes aired for children on TV. Kids exposed to such TV adverts were more likely to eat the brands of cereals they had seen advertised, the researchers found.

Children’s eating habits develop during their preschool years and children who are overweight by the age of 5 are likely to remain overweight into adolescence and adulthood, the study showed.

The adoption of poor eating habits and diets of low quality, too few fruits and vegetables and too much sugar, salt and fat can lead to obesity, a known risk factor for 13 cancers, they noted.

“One factor believed to contribute to children’s poor quality diets is the marketing of nutritionally poor foods directly to children,” Jennifer Emond, of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Centre, said.

“Brands specifically target children in their advertising knowing that children will ask their parents for those products.”

For the study, published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, the team included preschool-aged children to see how exposure to TV adverts for high-sugar cereals influences kids’ subsequent intake of those advertised cereals.

Emond’s team purchased an advertising database and actually counted, by brand, the cereal adverts that aired on the children’s TV network programmes that each child watched. Parents were asked about the shows their kids watched and what cereals their kids ate in the past week, every eight weeks, for one year.

“Efforts to promote and support quality diets at a young age are important to foster the good lifestyle behaviours,” Emond noted.