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 Children’s requests to go to the fast food chains drove how often
families ate there, and kids’ requests were often motivated by a
desire to collect toy premiums featured in the TV ads, researchers
found.
Some fast food restaurants have promised not to engage in misleading
advertising, said lead study author Jennifer Emond. McDonalds and
Burger King, for example, pledged to make toys the secondary focus
of their ads.
However, in previous research, Emond found that children noticed the
toys in ads just as much as the food, suggesting that these
restaurants may not be keeping their promise.
“We conducted this current study to see if a child's exposure to TV
ads for kid's fast food meals related to family visits to those
restaurants,” said Emond, an instructor at the Geisel School of
Medicine at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The researchers also wanted to see if these visits were related to a
child wanting to collect a toy from a restaurant, Emond said.
The Dartmouth team surveyed 100 parents of children ages three to
seven, asking them how often their children watched shows on
Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, Cartoon Network and Disney, children's
networks where fast-food companies often advertise, and how often
they visited McDonald’s or Burger King.
As reported in The Journal of Pediatrics, the researchers found that
37 percent of parents reported visiting McDonald’s or Burger King at
least once per month.
In addition, 54 percent of the children asked to visit at least one
of the restaurants. This number was higher for the 29 percent of
children who collected toys from the restaurants, of whom nearly 83
percent asked to visit one or both of the restaurants.
Families with more TVs at home and those with a TV in the child's
bedroom visited fast food restaurants more often than other
families.
Children who watched more TV during the day, and who spent more time
watching one of the four children's networks, also tended to have
more visits to fast food restaurants.
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Emond said children are attracted to the toys they see in fast food
commercials, and this leads them to want to visit these restaurants.
“That is risky because the foods offered at these restaurants are
high in calories, fat and sugar, and young children who eat at these
restaurants may develop poor dietary habits that lead to excess
weight gain and poor health,” Emond said.
Vivica Kraak, an assistant professor of food and nutrition policy at
Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, said the study is somewhat limited by
its small size. However, she noted, other research confirms that
marketers focus heavily on getting children to recognize food
brands.
Kraak, who was not involved in the research, said younger children
may be especially vulnerable because they cannot distinguish between
ads intended to sell a product and information given to them by an
adult.
In addition, Kraak said by email, “Children develop deep emotional
relationships with these characters and mascots . . . that are in
the form of a toy and they want to collect them.”
Kraak recommends that parents follow the American Academy of
Pediatrics guidelines and limit children’s television viewing to
less than two hours per day. She also advises parents to select
channels such as PBS that show Sesame Workshop characters or the
Disney Channel that use their characters to promote fruits and
vegetables.
“We have to be realistic that children will watch TV,” Emond said.
“But parents have many options for commercial-free programming,
which are great options for parents to have more control over how
marketers reach their children.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1HuTODB The Journal of Pediatrics, online
October 30, 2015.
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