Nutrition: Selling Junk Food to Children

What's Wrong with Ads: Nutrition
See also: | 2006 Lawsuit re Junk Foods | Alcohol Ads | www.nojunkfood.org

Under Pressure, Food Producers Shift to Healthier Products
By MELANIE WARNER | The New York Times | December 16, 2005

For years, food companies have responded to criticism about the nutritional quality of their products by maintaining that all food can fit into a balanced diet. There are no bad foods, they argue, just bad diets.

That is starting to change. As major food producers face scrutiny over their role in contributing to increasing childhood obesity rates, they are under pressure to make fundamental shifts in the way they sell their products to American children.

Kraft and PepsiCo have created rating systems to designate healthier foods. McDonald's said it would begin printing detailed nutrition information on its packaging in February.

Entertainment companies are also feeling pressure. Walt Disney said that beginning in the next few months, it would remove characters like Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse and Chicken Little from candy and food products it determined to be unhealthy for children. And in partnership with a major supermarket chain, which Disney would not identify, the company will put Mickey Mouse thumbs-up seals on items like bananas and on store-brand products like pasta and juices.

A Disney spokesman, Gary Foster, said, "We wanted to give parents healthier alternatives and help in reversing obesity trends."

None of these changes go as far as the Institute of Medicine, a leading scientific advisory group, urges. In a report last week, an institute committee of 16 nutrition and marketing experts called for sweeping changes in the way the food industry markets its products to children. It added that 80 percent to 97 percent of the food products now aimed at children and teenagers are of "poor nutritional quality."

The food industry is divided over how it should respond. General Mills and Kellogg, which derive a large part of their revenue from products aimed at children, are resisting changing many of their practices. Kraft and PepsiCo, whose products are aimed at a broader section of consumers, seem more willing to adapt. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, a large lobbying group, is resisting the development of an industrywide rating system for healthier foods - one of the leading recommendations in the institute's report.

And Disney's efforts only go so far. Although it dropped an exclusive deal with McDonald's, some movies may continue to use tie-ins to McDonald's and other fast-food chains. Today, characters from "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" start appearing in boxes of the chain's Happy Meals.

So far, just one company, Kraft Foods, has significantly curtailed the amount of unhealthy food it markets to children under 12. The rest of the food and restaurant industry has yet to take any major steps in line with the report's major recommendations. While companies have made some efforts to reformulate products and introduce healthier offerings (removing trans fatty acids, for instance), consumer advocates and nutrition experts say that many of these attempts fall woefully short.

For instance, General Mills, the company that spends the most money marketing packaged food to children, promotes the addition of whole grains to its lines of cereal, even though many of these are 40 percent sugar and aggressively advertised to children.

Earlier this year, General Mills tried to provide more nutrition information by displaying icons in a product's "Goodness Corner."

But a consumer watchdog criticized the move because there are 26 different icons, rather than a clear-cut rating system.

"I work in this area and I don't even know what some of those things are referring to," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group.

A spokeswoman for General Mills, Marybeth Thorsgard, declined to comment on the Institute of Medicine's report, saying that the company had not had a chance to read through the 600-page document.

But in a presentation this year, General Mills vigorously defended its cereal.

"We strongly think that products like cereal can be advertised responsibly to children," said Kendall J. Powell, the company's chief operating officer, at an Institute of Medicine workshop in January. "Cereal eaters, including kids who eat presweetened cereals, are getting a good start to their day."

Kellogg, the second-largest packaged-food marketer to children, also said it did not want to comment on the Institute of Medicine's recommendations. In a statement, a spokeswoman, Jill Saletta, said the company offered a "wide variety of products" and "remains a committed partner in the fight against obesity."

ConAgra Foods and Mars said they were focusing on developing healthier foods rather than restricting marketing or rating their products. McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and Nestlé had no comment on the report.

Kraft and PepsiCo also appear to be alone in supporting the idea of an industrywide rating system for healthier foods.

"I think there may be an antitrust issue," said Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for the Grocery Manufacturers Association. "Whenever people talk about the industry getting together and deciding which products to sell, it sounds to me like something we could get sued for."

Some legal experts said, though, that food companies were more likely to face lawsuits if they did not think proactively and listen to criticism.

N. Louise Ellingsworth, a partner in the law firm of Bryan Cave, which has worked in the past with food companies, said: "Sometimes, companies think that by making changes you risk calling attention to yourself and focusing on the problem. But for companies who don't act, their mistakes will become obvious years later. The plaintiffs' bar is watching very closely, and everyone's got a target on their back right now."

PepsiCo insists that its "Smart Spot" program for identifying healthier products is more a shrewd business decision than a form of legal insurance. The company said that sales from the Smart Spot products grew by 13 percent in the first three quarters of the year, three times as fast as the rest of its business. "We believe this is a huge business opportunity," said Brock Leach, the chief innovation officer.

Although many nutrition and public health advocates have applauded Kraft and PepsiCo for breaking with the rest of the food industry, they say that both companies have yet to go the distance. Some of their children's products, for instance, are hardly carrots and broccoli - sugar-free Kool-Aid with artificial sweeteners, Kraft macaroni and cheese with processed cheese, baked Cheetos and peanut butter Cap'n Crunch cereal.

And Pepsi has not stopped marketing its non-Smart Spot products like regular Cheetos and Gatorade to children. It said that by early in 2006, half of all its spending on advertising aimed at children would be for Smart Spot products, an increase from 38 percent this year.

But Susan Linn, associate director of Judge Baker Children's Center, a nonprofit group in Boston, asked: "What's the point of doing 50 percent? If they were really concerned about children, they would stop completely."

Licensing of favorite characters also continues to be an enormously popular and effective marketing tactic that not even Kraft is certain it wants to abandon. The company, which features Dora the Explorer on its Nabisco Teddy Grahams and Fairly OddParents on Cheese Nips crackers, said that its licensing policy "is being discussed."

The question is not even on the table at PepsiCo. Mr. Leach called the focus on marketing methods like character licensing "misplaced energy."

"Our point of view," he said, "is let's focus on making healthier products, and that will eventually move the whole marketing mix."

While the members of the Institute of Medicine committee said they were willing to trust the industry to make voluntary changes, they have warned that if there is not significant improvement in the types of products marketed to children after two years, they will press Congress to take action.

J. Michael McGinnis, a senior scholar at the institute and chairman of the committee, called for the creation of a division in the federal Department of Health and Human Services to assess the food industry's progress.

Not surprisingly, food companies say that they, too, think self-regulation can work and cite the Children's Advertising Review Unit, a group financed by food, toy and media companies to monitor children's advertising.

But Elizabeth Lascoutx, director of the Children's Advertising Review Unit, said the group did not concern itself with junk-food marketing. Its job, she said, was to make sure that ads aimed at children were fair and accurate, not to see if they featured healthful or low-calorie products.

"We don't set standards or get involved in good food, bad food issues," Ms. Lascoutx said. "We're lawyers, not nutritionists."

Mr. McGinnis said he thought that the scope of the Children's Advertising Review Unit should be expanded to include the nutritional quality of children's food, though that recommendation is not part of the report.
Copyright 2005 | The New York Times Company

Kellogg and Viacom to Face Suit Over Ads for Children
By MELANIE WARNER | The New York Times | January 19, 2006

SpongeBob is not your friend.

That is the message of a lawsuit announced yesterday, asserting that characters like SpongeBob SquarePants - despite his ever-present grin - are harming children's health by hawking what the plaintiffs' consider to be junk food.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Boston-based group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and two parents served notice that they intended to sue Viacom, the maker of the popular children's TV show "SpongeBob SquarePants," and the Kellogg Company, a big marketer of food to children, which features the lovable SpongeBob on packages of cereal, Pop Tarts and cookies.

At a news conference in Washington yesterday, the groups argued that using cartoon characters to sell to children is deceptive and unfair." It's unfair because kids under 5 don't even know it's a commercial," said Stephen Gardner, director of litigation for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "They think it's a very short SpongeBob program. And it's unfair because at a very important time in their physical and psychological development, kids are being encouraged to eat food that is just not good for them."

The suit, to be filed in Massachusetts under the state's aggressive consumer protection laws, seeks to ban the marketing of food of "poor nutritional quality" to children under 8. Under the law, plaintiffs are required to give a 30-day notice to defendants before filing a suit.
If successful, the suit would apply only to marketing activities in Massachusetts, but Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said he thought the suit would have national implications.

"Kellogg is not going to market SpongeBob Pop Tarts one way in Massachusetts and another everywhere else," he said.In a statement, Kellogg responded to the notice of the lawsuit by saying it had a "longstanding commitment to marketing in a responsible manner."

"We will also continue to educate and inform consumers of all ages about the importance of both balanced nutrition and physical activity in maintaining a healthy lifestyle," said a spokeswoman, Jill Saletta.

A Viacom spokesman, Dan Martinsen, said criticisms of Viacom were unfounded because the company had recently undertaken a number of initiatives intended to promote healthy eating and address the problem of childhood obesity.

The company has licensed SpongeBob, Dora the Explorer and characters from LazyTown for use on packages of Grimmway baby carrots and SpongeBob for bags of Boskovich spinach.

This year, Nickelodeon is to contribute $30 million to the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a joint project of the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association to combat childhood obesity, Mr. Martinsen said.

Amid concerns over rising childhood obesity, food and entertainment companies have come under fire for how they market food to children.

In December, the Institute of Medicine, a scientific advisory group, issued a report saying that at least 80 percent of the food marketed to children is unhealthy. Among the report's recommendations were that food companies stop using licensed TV and film characters to entice children to eat such food.

Such recommendations, however, are not enforceable, and none of the major marketers of food to children - General Mills, Kraft, Burger King and McDonald's - have announced moves to reduce or eliminate their use of licensed characters.

Mr. Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that based on monitoring his staff did last fall, 98 percent of Kellogg's ads on Saturday morning television promoted highly sweentened foods like Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes cereals. All of Kellogg's 21 Web sites for children feature such food, and 84 percent of the Kellogg products with package marketing aimed at children were of poor nutritional quality, according to Mr. Jacobson.

Sherri Carlson, a 41-year old mother of three and one of the suit's plaintiffs, said she found it hard to assert parental authority in the face of persistent marketing. "If my youngest sees her favorite TV character on the box, she will push me to buy it, even if she has never had the product before," said Ms. Carlson, of Wakefield, Mass. "Whenever I shop with my kids, I end up compromising and finding some 'best of the worst' junk food to keep them happy."

After years of shunning lawsuits in favor of public relations campaigns, Congressional lobbying and regulatory petitioning, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said it had decided to pursue legal action to force change.

"We used to file all sorts of complaints with the government," Mr. Jacobson said. "Sometimes we'd get a response, but usually nothing happened. Now, when we have told companies that we're going to sue them, they show up in our offices the next week."

Mr. Jacobson said the group was pursuing legal action on marketing to children, because the government had failed to regulate. At a July meeting of the Federal Trade Commission, the chairwoman, Deborah Platt Majoras, said it was not "productive" for the agency to restrict the types of ads companies can show to children. Ms. Majoras said she was counting on food and entertainment companies to regulate themselves and come up with ways to sell healthier offerings to children.

In addition to the Kellogg-Viacom lawsuit, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has been working with half a dozen lawyers on a possible lawsuit against Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and their major bottlers over the sales of soda and other sugary beverages in schools.

Ads boost drinking among young
CNN (Reuters) January 2, 2006

Young adults as well as teenagers drink more under the influence of advertising for alcoholic beverages, researchers said on Monday.
A survey of young people aged 15 to 26 found that for each additional alcohol advertisement viewed per month, there followed a 1 percent rise in the average number of drinks consumed, said study author Leslie Snyder of the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

The study's findings counter industry arguments that only adult drinkers heed alcohol advertising, Snyder wrote in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

In the study -- released around the New Year's holiday that is often associated with toasts and excessive imbibing -- the researchers conducted four rounds of interviews between 1999 and 2001 with a group of young people, with the initial 1,872 subjects selected randomly.

Another finding was that for each additional dollar spent per capita on alcohol advertising in a particular media market, study participants drank 3 percent more per month.

In markets with heavy alcohol advertising of more than $10 per capita per month, alcohol consumption increased over time and reached a peak of 50 drinks per month by age 25.

The study measured advertising exposure on each of four media: television, radio, magazines and billboards.

"The results also contradict claims that advertising is unrelated to youth drinking amounts: that advertising at best causes brand switching, only affects those older than the legal drinking age or is effectively countered by current educational efforts," Snyder wrote.

In an editorial in the journal, David Jernigan of Georgetown University in Washington said the study was the first of its kind to link young people's alcohol use directly to objective measures of industry spending on advertising.

The study "calls into question the industry's argument that its roughly $1.8 billion in measured media expenditures per year have no impact on underage drinking," he wrote.

Snyder doubted whether the industry was heeding voluntary guidelines that 70 percent of the audience for its advertising be at least 21 years old, the legal drinking age.