May 4, 2023 – Packaged foods for children that have popular characters on the box are probably less healthy than options that don’t have dazzling labels, a new Canadian study indicates.
Researchers from the University of Toronto said their study was designed to examine “the relationship between nutrient composition and marketing power.” They examined package design and nutrition data for 5,850 “child-relevant” packaged foods that were listed in a 2017 Canadian database. More than 20 categories of food were defined by researchers as being “relevant” to kids. The list included cookies, crackers, toaster pastries, drinkable yogurt, and cereal.
Overall, 13% of the “child-relevant” foods were considered by the researchers to have “child-appealing marketing.” Those foods were significantly more likely to be poor in nutritional quality, compared to foods with less appealing packaging. The foods with packages designed to influence kids were more likely to have high sugar content and low levels of nutrients that Canadian health officials say kids need the most.
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
“There are many products in our grocery stores that are very powerfully marketed and heavily targeted to children,” study author Christine Mulligan, PhD, told CNN. “Unfortunately, we also found that these products are, more often than not, very unhealthy and of worse nutritional quality than products that aren’t being promoted to children.”
Worldwide, public health officials have expressed concern at rising rates of childhood health problems related to nutrition, such as obesity and diabetes. The CDC issued an alarming report earlier this year indicating that 1 in 3 children in the U.S. don’t eat a daily serving of fruit, and half of kids don’t eat a daily serving of vegetables.
The researchers called on governments to regulate marketing that targets children on food packaging.
“Unhealthy products with powerful child-appealing marketing displayed on [the] package are prevalent in the food supply,” the authors concluded. “Implementing marketing restrictions that protect children should be a priority.”
