Breakfast products that are aimed at children contain significantly more sugar than those aimed at adults, a Spanish study has revealed.
The researchers analysed a 355 advertisements from 117 different products from 2015 to 2019, and found that the average amount of sugar in the breakfast products analysed and advertised for adults was 10.25%, while for children it was 36.20%.
“Although much of the adult population still adhere to the Mediterranean diet, it is a practice that is waning among children and young people, who are increasingly opting to eat processed industrial products with a high sugar content for breakfast,” explained Mireia Montaña, UOC Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences professor and researcher.
Mònika Jiménez, professor of Advertising and Public Relations at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and co-author of another study on breakfast food advertising involving Prof Montaña, warned of persuasive advertising for foods with little nutritional value.
She said, “The less closely a product correlates to that which would be deemed healthy nutritional parameters, the greater the tendency for the advertising discourse to focus on hedonism or happiness and tend towards persuasion.” As Jiménez explained, when such discourse alludes to positive feelings, it stimulates certain areas of the brain that lead us to consume, a strategy which “is especially harmful in relation to certain audiences, such as minors, because they are very susceptible to these kinds of stimuli.”
Profs Montaña and Jiménez found that low nutritional quality breakfast foods were advertised mostly through television (39%), followed by radio (28%), the internet (18%), newspapers (6%), magazines (5%), outdoor advertising (2%) and cinema (0.56%). “TV is the most effective medium when it comes to persuading children. And when is it that children are going to the supermarket with their parents and end up imposing their preferences with regard to what goes into the shopping trolley? Precisely when they are younger, up until preadolescence,” Prof Jiménez pointed out.
Though there are regulations in Spain preventing advertisers from targeting children directly, there are no such restrictions for products which can be aimed at any age group, such as hot chocolate. Advertising aimed at children to use ‘pester power’ on their parents results in food being bought which is then consumed by the entire family.
Their recommendations included more stringent regulatory frameworks, better nutritional education aimed at parents and children, and added taxes on certain products such as soft drinks.
Source: News-Medical.Net
Journal information: Blasco, M.M., et al. (2021) Breakfast Food Advertisements in Mediterranean Countries: Products’ Sugar Content in the Adverts from 2015 to 2019. Children. doi.org/10.3390/children8010014.
