Kill the Messenger?

By Daren Fonda

If you can't pry those SpongeBob Cheez-It crackers from your kid's hands, you're not alone. Public-health advocates say food advertising aimed at children has spun out of control--infiltrating schools, sports arenas, the Web and, of course, TV, where it has become ubiquitous, thanks to the explosion of 24/7 children's programming on cable and satellite. Killing the messenger won't cure the childhood-obesity epidemic, experts agree. But calls are rising for the Feds to crack down, as a growing body of research suggests that all this advertising is doing a terrific job of whetting kids' appetite for fatty, salty and sugary fare and rendering it tougher than ever for both parents and children to Just Say No.

The problem goes way beyond the old Saturday-morning cartoon shows. Children are now exposed to 40,000 TV ads a year, up from 20,000 in the 1970s, according to a report by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Up to 70% of those ads are for food (though some researchers put the figure much lower, at a still considerable 25%). Ads for high-fat, high-salt foods have more than doubled since the 1980s, while commercials for fruits and vegetables remain in short supply.

Any attempt to change that is likely to run into resistance from some powerful business groups: advertisers, food companies and broadcasters. Banning certain types of ads, they argue, would amount to censorship. Besides, "if you don't have children's advertising, there won't be children's programs," says Dan Jaffe, executive vice president for the Association of National Advertisers. Such arguments helped persuade Congress not to act in the late 1970s, when an activist Federal Trade Commission chairman tried to stiffen rules for children's commercials. After fierce lobbying from business groups, the agency was stripped of most of its authority to broadly regulate TV advertising to children and the FTC dropped the matter.

Norway, Sweden and the province of Quebec, however, have all banned child-targeted TV advertising. In Britain, the BBC has implemented a nutrition policy for its kids' characters, such as the Teletubbies, prohibiting them to be associated with junky fare.

Food marketers are increasingly sidestepping TV. At Nabiscoworld.com for instance, children are enticed to play an Oreo dunking game, join a Chips Ahoy party and race around in a Triscuit 4x4. Harmless fun? It would be if children under age 8 could distinguish between advertising and entertainment. But psychologists say most kids that young are unable to recognize the concept of "persuasive intent" in commercials, and health advocates charge that food companies are exploiting this confusion.

For now, the government's most salient media campaign to reduce childhood obesity is an initiative called Verb, which encourages kids to be more physically active. Absent from its promotional materials, however, is any mention of the need for children to cut back on junk food. --By Daren Fonda