Ottawa’s Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology released a report last month that raises, once again, the possibility that food and beverage advertising targeting children might be banned.
It echoes recommendations by the World Health Organization and by health agencies and medical associations across the country.
In recent years, the Canadian Medical Association, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, the Canadian Diabetes Association, the Canadian Cardiovascular Society, the Canadian Public Health Association and many others have called for restrictions on junk-food advertising to kids.
Many of these agencies testified before the Senate committee.
“With the exception of the food industry,” the committee reports in Obesity in Canada: A Whole-of-Society Approach to a Healthier Canada, “witnesses unanimously supported strict controls on the advertising of unhealthy food and beverages to children, although the specifics of such an approach varied to some degree.”
Numerous neurological and psychological studies demonstrate the human brain does not develop the ability to think critically or abstractly — skills necessary for assessing the value and purpose of marketing messages — until about adolescence. Research shows that kids younger than four to five years are unable to distinguish advertising from non-commercial information, and that kids younger than seven to eight years are not yet able to recognize that ads are designed to persuade. Other studies show that six-month-olds can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots, and brand loyalty can develop in children as young as two years old.
The delay in the brain’s cognitive development, say psychologists, leaves children vulnerable to manipulation.
Combine that with the immense spending power and purchasing influence many young Canadians enjoy these days, and children become marks for unethical marketers.
Fast-food corporations and junk-food manufacturers are among many types of corporations lining their pockets with kids’ pocket money. They deliberately target children with advertising — and reap the results.
In 1989, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a 1980 Quebec law banning advertising to children under the age of 13.
The ruling stated that, due to children’s cognitive development, advertising to them is unethical.
Although the Quebec law has its problems, a 2011 study by University of British Columbia researchers found that Quebec children consumed less fast food than their counterparts in other provinces, where the ban doesn’t exist.
With evidence mounting and health agencies pushing for restrictions, advertisers faced a choice. They could do nothing — and have controls imposed upon them — or they could regulate themselves.
In 2007, many big Canadian food manufacturers voluntarily agreed to limit advertising of unhealthy foods to children or to focus advertising aimed at kids on healthier food choices.
However, they remained free to determine the nutrient profile of “healthy.”
As a result, choices being advertised to kids under the “Better for You” campaign include products such as Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Kool-Aid Jammers and numerous other high-sugar, high-salt, high-trans fat snacks. (Irony is a form of humour the human brain typically begins to recognize and appreciate as funny only — again — with the onset of adolescence.)
Often, the better-for-you angle rests on redefined “child-sized” serving sizes sufficiently small to keep per-serving calories low. But who eats just three tortilla chips?
Further, if a “serving” contains less than 0.5 grams of an ingredient — trans fats, for example — that ingredient needn’t be listed at all. (I can hardly wait for the day when a serving of Froot Loops is listed as containing no ingredients at all.)
Charlene Elliott, Canada research chair in food marketing, policy and children’s health at the University of Calgary, makes the point that food marketing aimed at kids nurtures unhealthy connections with food.
Foods packaged and sold for children are “fun” — strings of cheese you can play with, yogurt containers that glow in the dark, fruit-leather candy cut into fun shapes and dyed rainbow colours, and fast foods that come with games or promises of happiness.
The message sold to kids is that food is entertainment. If you’re bored, eat. If you want to have fun, eat. If you want to be happy, eat.
No wonder Canada’s front-line health agencies testified before the Senate committee that restricting food and beverage advertising to kids might help keep the country’s kids — tomorrow’s adults — healthy.
