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 In an experiment with 60 kids aged 2 to 5 years, researchers focused
on how advertising influences what’s known as eating in the absence
of hunger.
They gave all the children a healthy snack to make sure they had a
full belly, and then sat the kids down to watch a TV program with
ads for Bugles corn chips or for a department store.
All of the kids had Bugles corn chips and one other snack in front
of them while they watched the show. Children who saw ads for the
corn chips ate 127 calories on average, compared to just 97 calories
for kids who didn’t see Bugles on the screen, researchers report in
Pediatrics.
“This is the first study to show that exposure to food ads cues
immediate eating among younger children - even after they had a
filling snack,” said lead study author Jennifer Emond of Geisel
School of Medicine at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
“Young children average up to three hours of TV viewing a day,”
Emond added by email. “If kids are exposed to food ads during that
time, they may unconsciously overconsume snacks which can lead to
extra weight gain.”
More than one third of U.S. children are overweight or obese,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends against any
screen time for children younger than 18 months and suggests no more
than an hour a day for kids aged 2 to 5 in part to encourage
language development, support healthy sleep habits and limit
sedentary activity that can set preschoolers on a path toward
obesity.
The type of TV program matters too. The AAP encourages educational
programming like “Sesame Street” that can support language learning.
For the experiment, researchers sat kids down to watch a 14-minute
segment of “Elmo’s World” that included three minutes of
advertising.
Before the show started, all of the kids could snack as much as they
liked on banana, sliced cheese and crackers. They also got water to
drink.
Children were randomly assigned to view ads for national department
stores or to watch Bugles spots that showed kids playing and eating
the corn chips.
While the shows played, kids were given bowls of Nabisco Teddy
Grahams and Bugles corn snacks.
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There wasn’t a meaningful association between how much kids ate
during the program and their age, weight or the way their parents
typically supervised mealtime at home.
In particular, researchers looked at whether parental feeding
restrictions – which can include things like pressuring kids to eat
or prohibiting certain foods – and didn’t find any association
between these practices and the amount of snacks kids consumed in
the experiment.
One limitation of the experiment is that it included mostly white,
affluent rural kids, which may make the results less relevant to the
broader population of U.S. children, the authors note.
Young children can also be unreliable when they tell adults whether
they are full, so it’s possible some children who claimed they had
enough to eat before watching TV were actually hungry, the
researchers also point out.
Even so, the findings should give parents another reason to limit
children’s exposure to media that comes with advertising, said Dr.
Julie Lumeng, a researcher at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott
Children’s Hospital who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Many children's programs are now instead using product placement to
advertise,” Lumeng added by email. “Parents should also pay
attention to how product placement occurs in the television programs
or other media their young children may be watching.”
Age 2 may be too young to understand how ads can influence behavior,
Lumeng noted.
“But parents can consider gradually introducing the power of
advertising to young children as a trategy for helping their
children resist the effects of these ads,” Lumeng said. “Ultimately
limiting the child's exposure to the ads is the key strategy.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2fCqsMF Pediatrics, online November 21, 2016.
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