Into the mouths of babes: Marketing to children

Nutritionist

This lecture is dedicated to Jo Rogers - one of the most influential people in the lives and careers of many people involved in human nutrition.

Jo always encouraged dietitians to stand up for themselves, challenging people when you believed the facts were different from what they were saying.

Jo's most impressive quality to me was that she always said what she thought and she never bowed or scraped to anyone. Over the years, I continued to admire Jo Rogers' staunch maintenance of her integrity. If she felt strongly about anything, she spoke out about it. The older I get, the more I believe we often stay silent for too long. It is in this vein that I shall continue today in discussing the issue of 'marketing to children'.

Many of us feel strongly about issues such as:

• the way junk foods are advertised to young children;
• the ignorance about food and cooking that is being enhanced by the axing of home science classes;
• issues relating to the environmental and global effects of marketing particular foods;
• a lack of regard for the consumer viewpoint in some sections of the food industry;
• the use of food resources to produce useless products when there is national and world hunger (18 million people die of malnutrition/year, even though more than enough food is produced to feed them);
• and the way Aboriginal people's health has been ruined by white people actively destroying their family and food values and who now criticise them for making poor dietary choices.

Food has turned out to be so much more than mere nourishment. It concerns politics and power, economics, health, concern - or indifference - for others, ecology and sustainability, morality and questions of how far we can and should proceed with technological advances. Food is certainly much more than conventional nutrition or how to set a pretty table.

Feeling strongly about any or all of these issues does not mean we should become so emotional that we are irrational. But we should speak out and I think Jo Rogers would approve if we did. In fact, without Jo here, we should raise issues, even if they are politically provocative.

Jo Rogers also had patience and realised that changes take time. We may need to stick to our guns with perseverance since most things don't happen overnight. But if change takes time, it's all the more reason why we had better get started.

So let's take a look at the issue of marketing foods to children.

Each year since 1993, I have been sent several copies of brochures advertising conferences with titles such as Marketing to kids, or Consumer kids. Usually, there is an associated meeting on marketing to adolescents. The fees are steep - around $1600 for two days for kids or you can add on the extra day for adolescents for another $600. Some years, there are two such conferences. I presume enough people must go to make them worthwhile.

For your money, you get to hear how companies such as Coca Cola, Pizza Hut, Cadbury Schweppes, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Mars Confectionery, Hungry Jacks, Donut King and The Walt Disney Company have won the hearts, minds and pocket money of our kids. You also get the low-down from these and other advertising companies on the hot growth areas, on how to effectively manage a premium kid brand, forecast the buying patterns of kids, predict market trends and use the type of advertising that gets the best response. They tell you how many billions the child and youth market is worth and throw out a challenge to establish brand loyalty and purchasing habits so that these kids will be "your product's consumers for life".

B&T magazine (12 May 1995) says that "the country's youth is increasingly being recognised as a market force to be recognised. This is an area advertisers should be looking at."

There is another point of view. Philip Adams calls the efforts to sell junk foods to children "preying games". Adams says that, "we deem the paedophile shocking, yet for every such predator, there's a major corporation that sets out to seduce a million kids. For every individual who molests a child, there's a corporation that molests childhood itself. We think nothing of turning our children into addicted consumers."

Even before they reach school age, children are bombarded with advertisements to entice them to McDonalds or to drink Coca Cola or to demand that their parents buy a particular chocolate-flavoured breakfast cereal. There is no age of consent in advertising. Grown men and women sit around and work out ways to target children so they will demand particular products. The marketing conferences are designed to teach others how to conquer the kid market and ask questions such as "can your organisation afford to neglect one of Australia's fastest growing categories".

Is this what we want for our children? Some say that children have to learn to live in a consumer society, that we shouldn't try to protect them. However, we do protect children in other ways. We don't allow them to buy alcohol or cigarettes or go to movies that a censor has rated as unsuitable for them. We also impose restrictions on their free time by making them go to school for five days a week. Child labour has been outlawed - at least in most countries. Yet when it comes to food and drink, we give the marketers a free hand.

In 1995, the Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs released a report about advertising directed at children. They noted that consumer organisations, community groups, educators, child development professionals and various individuals had supported their concern about advertisements directed at young children. They also noted that industry organisations were opposed to these concerns.

These concerns were not new. They were voiced at least as far back as 1982 - and Jo Rogers was one of those concerned. At that time, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal conducted a survey and found that 77% of people thought there should be no advertising or less advertising in children's television programs; 86% of people thought that advertisements encouraged children to want whatever they see. Almost 10 years later, the concerns were similar, although a major 1993 survey reported that many people thought advertisements could be a good way to present children with information about products. We may need sponsored advertising for healthy products that currently do not rate an advertising budget. The view that we can't get children to eat healthy products may well be simply because we don't have the kind of budget to spend that Coca Cola_TM use so effectively to create demand for their product all over the world.

In 1994, research from Dr Dale Kunkel from the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA found that young children below the age of five cannot discriminate between programs and advertisements and children below seven to eight years of age do not recognise the persuasive intent of television advertising. Dr Kunkel believes that children must be able to understand that advertising aims to persuade before they can be considered fair targets for advertisers.

So do we need to make a ruling that young children should not be targeted by marketing efforts? This could be achieved by not allowing advertising during times when young children are the major television viewing audience. Such decisions are politically unpopular and won't be taken without a fight.

The idea of restricting advertising is not new. It has been mentioned repeatedly for many years. No one ever acts on it because of resistance from those producing advertisements, those producing foods they want to advertise and the television channels themselves. But it has worked in some countries. Canada does not allow advertisements during programs directed at young children. Scandinavian countries do not allow advertising targeted at children. The Netherlands restricts advertising of some products such as confectionery until late at night when young children are, hopefully, sleeping.

Some question whether this is going too far and ask if there is any evidence that children who watch television demand more of the foods advertised.

The answer is yes, and it goes back as far as 1978 when a Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts published a report of its 'Inquiry into the Impact of Television on the Development and Learning Behaviour of Children', in which witnesses complained that 'much of the advertising directed to children encouraged unhealthy dietary habits'. At that time, most food advertisements directed at children between 4pm and 6pm at the time were for sugared foods. Repeated surveys by the Australian Consumers Association over the years since then have shown that little has changed, except that the sugary foods have now been joined by fatty fast foods.

The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal's report on Children Television and Food, published in 1982 also found that children described as heavy television viewers were the most likely to have consumed ice cream, crisps, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Kit Kats and Snickers bars - all of which were being heavily advertised at the time.

I have often been told by food companies and advertising people that advertisements do not make people buy products. The tobacco industry also uses this absurd argument which defies commonsense. If advertising doesn't work, why spend millions on it? Commonsense is a misnomer since it is rare. However, Jo Rogers was one of its greatest advocates.

Some say that parents should watch television with their children and discuss advertisements. But young children are unable to understand persuasion and how many parents really take the time to sit and watch with their small children. In many cases, the television is turned on to give parents time to do household chores. You can select programs carefully for their content, but you have no way of vetting the advertisements.

Taking a leaf out of the marketers books and marketing healthy foods to children may be a viable option for older children, but the notion of trying to market something to a child who is too young to understand the concept of marketing is wrong. Why can't we just teach children - by example - about food. When they are hungry, why not simply offer them healthy choices. The answer to that lies in the variety of foods on offer.

I do not suggest we should never give children treat foods, but very young children can understand the concept of a menu. No child ever goes to McDonalds and asks for pizza. They know it's not on the menu. In a similar way, children can understand that some foods only appear at parties or at Christmas or on some other particular occasion. For everyday eating, from either the home kitchen or school canteen, the choices should all be healthy.

Ultimately we need a food policy for children and adults. This needs to consider not only the nutritional value of foods, but also issues such as:

• sustainability of the food supply;
• how responsibly we are using the world's energy resources to produce foods;
• issues of global, and national, equity in food;
• who is driving the decisions that are taken about food.

For example, who is pushing for more foods to be genetically manipulated and why? Is it to feed the world's poor and hungry? In some cases, it may well be. In other cases, farmers in Third World countries are adversely affected by patenting of crop seed. Plant Breeders' Rights used to forbid selling seeds from a crop but did allow farmers to save seeds for the following year's crop. Large multinational companies now take seeds from crops originally grown in (and belonging to) Third World countries, and make a genetic change (often advantageous) to the seed. This gives them a species-wide patent and means that farmers cannot re-use seeds from such plants without paying a fee each year. Third World farmers often cannot afford the fee.

We may not previously have had to consider such problems, but a food policy must now consider motivation for the foods that are grown and harvested and marketed and look at whether these are compatible with issues that affect all consumers, children and adults. We have always thought we should stay away from these political issues. I don't believe we can continue to do so. For example, if we are going to promote consumption of soy products, we cannot help but become involved in the issue of the Roundup Ready_TM soy bean. We may prefer to look only at the nutritional value of soy beans, or how to prepare them in easy and delicious recipes. The politics of food means that we must also consider whether we want the Roundup Ready_TM bean.

We should also consider products containing artificial sweeteners and fake fats. Production of such ingredients uses vast amounts of the world's energy resources. The motivation is to enable companies to make a profit by selling people with an incredibly wide choice of foods even more products. Companies may claim the foods are designed so that overweight people can eat them without gaining weight. But obesity in the United States has continued to increase as literally thousands of no-fat foods flood the market. Perhaps obesity has increased because of such foods.

Foods containing fake fats are about to hit Australia. We will be encouraged to see them as ideal foods to market to children. Do we really want them? Commonsense tells us we don't need them, but may be displaced by motives of profit or simply a desire by health professionals not to rock the boat. I find it somewhat obscene that technology and energy resources are used for such products while other people starve for want of basic foodstuffs. If we are going to talk about marketing foods, we must consider such issues.

There are many different players in the food business. They include:

• farmers
• agricultural industries who produce seeds, pesticides and other agrochemicals
• food manufacturers
• food technologists
• packaging industries
• transport industries
• food retailers (supermarkets)
• caterers and cooks
• consumers
• public health officials
• environmental scientists
• governments (local, state and federal)
• nutritionists/dietitians
• doctors
• dentists
• advertisers and marketers
• educationists

The list is probably even greater. Town planners have a vital role to play, working out how we can constrain the urban spread that is putting houses on land where crops used to grow close to cities, moving the crops increasingly to land which cannot easily support them without a lot of fertiliser and irrigation that inadvertently increases salinity levels.

So the issue of marketing food is broad. If we fail to see where true boundaries lie, and the effects any decisions have on the foods we grow, promote and eat, we will have done a less than thorough job.

However, we do need to consider some immediate questions. If we accept that we should not actively seek to market foods to young children, what should our attitude be to older children. Above the age of eight, children can learn about marketing. They can understand persuasion, if they are taught. Should we therefore restrict marketing efforts to these children and try to apply them to worthwhile foods? A major question arises when we try to decide where we should draw the line.

In trying to teach children about theories of persuasion, how do we deal with the subtle effects of some companies' marketing methods? Schools have limited economic resources while food giants can afford to spend up big with schemes that appear on the surface to be altruistic. Thus they sponsor school sports or school reading programs or make monies available for some popular or needed activity. For their money, they get parents, teachers and pupils unwilling to criticise their products. Some also get their name displayed prominently on books, ovals or sporting equipment.

When a company name is associated with a school, there is an implicit sense that the school approves, or even recommends, the sponsoring company. It also becomes impossible for a teacher, a parent, and especially a child, to criticise the company's products. To add to the confusion, many foods link themselves with sport, when their nutritional balance has little or nothing positive to offer sport. For example, Mars bars, fast food hamburgers and high-fat chips are not what most sports dietitians would order. But when Mars Confectionery sponsors newsletters and other activities, some sports dietitians either maintain silence about Mars confectionery or lean on the old line of 'everything in moderation'. It's a line that should be valid but is often mis-used to excuse any marketing effort.

A company selling high-fat, high kilojoule products may want to associate itself with the healthy image of sport. But many children, especially girls, play little sport, and very few children play sport at high levels. The foods are more likely to be consumed by sporting spectators.

Sponsorship is disguised advertising and marketing and schools need to be watchful of its intrusion.

Mars confectionery launched a particularly objectionable sponsorship scheme a couple of years ago. The Mars Sports Equipment Program encouraged schools to collect wrappers from Mars confectionery or Mars ice cream. For every 2500 wrappers collected, the school could purchase $1200 worth of sporting equipment for $900 - a saving of $300. Collecting 20,000 wrappers meant you could have $1200 worth of sporting equipment for nothing. The absurdity of this scheme was that 20,000 Mars bars or ice creams would cost around $15,000. Had parents simply contributed this money, they would have been able to purchase twelve and a half times as much sporting equipment and also make a potential saving on dentist bills!

The real tragedy of schemes such as this is that they appeal to small and poor schools who do not already have access to quality sporting equipment.

In an effort to be seen to be doing something to control school sponsorship, various School Sponsorship Policy groups and committees have been set up with guidelines for sponsorship operations. These are all flagrantly breached by sponsorship schemes.

We have had Coles offering schools Apple computers in return for dockets for goods bought in their supermarkets. We have had Pizza Hut offering students vouchers for free pizzas for reading more books. Presumably the child would not go to Pizza Hut alone but would take other paying customers. Other companies have also sponsored read-a-thons, spell-a-thons, choral competitions and various sporting activities.

These are marketing campaigns that companies undertake if they see an advantage to their business. They are used to bribe children to read, stand around shopping centres asking people for their shopping dockets or wear clothing displaying an advertising logo. Such schemes may be easy for wealthy schools to turn down, but are difficult for schools in poorer areas to refuse. They also make it easier for governments to ignore the needs for proper funding - leaving it to sponsorship instead.

Marketing is all about encouraging people to make particular decisions to buy certain products. The products that encourage the greatest commercial marketing efforts are those where the profit level is high. That means products such as soft drinks, crisps, confectionery, fast foods and all the foods which consumers (probably correctly) call 'junk foods'. If children can't buy these foods themselves, they exert 'pester power' on whoever holds the purse strings.

This all sounds negative - and it is. But we need to know what we need to flee from. We could be more positive by asking whether marketing could also be used to encourage children to eat fruits, vegetables, breads, cereals and all the nutritional goodies we think they should have. The answer is yes. But who will pay for it. The growers of carrots or oranges or apricots or other foods with less 'added value' will never have the financial backing, although we are grateful for the efforts they do make.

Government departments of health or education could use marketing techniques to sell healthy foods to children, but this is unlikely to happen. Government departments are also strapped for cash and some are more interested in forging links with companies willing to contribute dollars.

Could the Australian Nutrition Foundation take on the role? To some extent it does and does so very well. This was Jo Rogers aim in her involvement with the ANF. Individual dietitians, doctors and home economics teachers are also helping promote healthy foods for children. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has recently put together guidelines for healthy eating for children. This has been criticised by others because it is not couched in the same terms as the Dietary Guidelines for Children in Australia and gives some different emphases. The ACGP list suggests minimising intake of refined carbohydrate foods and drinks such as soft drinks, cakes, biscuits and lollies and also saturated fats from foods such fast food burgers and crisps. Even more provocatively, the ACGP guidelines suggest minimising intake of additive-rich foods.

If we are going to try to market a healthy message to children, we need to be more supportive of each others efforts. We also need to avoid succumbing to the powerful persuasive techniques used by particular industries as part of their marketing techniques.

The Australian Sugar Industry has been engaged in persuasive tactics for some years. They began with a massive advertising campaign to convince Australians that sugar was "a natural part of life". This was accompanied and followed up with arguments to health professionals that the foe they should be fighting was fat, not sugar.

Of course, there was some truth in this. Saturated fats do have more adverse nutritional consequences than sugar. But finding a blacker sheep doesn't make you white!

The sugar industry discovered they could use the Glycaemic Index of foods to their advantage. Again, they have targeted health professionals, convincing them that since sucrose has a lower glycaemic index than carrots or bread, it should be given more status. They overlook the fact that carrots and bread have other important attributes. They also overlook the fact that, by definition, the glycaemic index is a number created to compare the effects of 50g quantities of carbohydrate from different foods. To get 50g of carbohydrate from carrots means eating 8-10 medium to large carrots whereas 50g of carbohydrate from refined sugar is just a little over that found in a can of soft drink.

There is almost certainly merit in considering the glycaemic index of different foods, but it is only one factor to consider and its current definition defies commonsense when the quantities of foods related to the index differ from what people consume in practice. Glycaemic Index has some value in marketing foods such as legumes, oats, pasta and bread made by old-style slow fermentation but it has sometimes been distorted for commercial gain.

While we are discussing the sugar industry, their latest marketing schemes are interesting. Advertisements state - quite accurately - that carbohydrate is found in bread, a banana, a potato or some sugar. But with sugar or any carbohydrate or fat, we need to look at the company it keeps.

Another marketing effort aims to convince health professionals that there is agreement among their peers that sugar presents no problems and should be removed from the Dietary Guidelines. A couple of good spokespeople who speak with great conviction dampen any objectors.

These people may not be paid directly by the sugar industry, but the institutions they work for receive much-needed grants from the industry or from related companies whose products are high in sugar. Sadly, many research institutions now face the same conflict of interest seen in schools that accept sponsorship.

The sugar industry is also tackling concerns about dental health - a subject that Jo Rogers felt as strongly about as she did about salt - the subject of last year's Memorial Lecture.

For years, the sugar industry has acknowledged that sugar is involved in dental caries, but dismissed its effects with lines such as - "apart from its effect on dental caries, sugar causes no other problems".

When the Australian Institute of Health & Welfare produced their authoritative document on The cost of diet-related disease in Australia, it found that 'dental caries' was the most expensive problem, costing more than all the costs associated with coronary heart disease or any type of cancer. These were not costings from pre-fluoride days, but were costs of caries in the 90s.

Sugar is not the only thing that causes holes in children's teeth - the sugar industry is correct in pointing out that any fermentable carbohydrate can do the same. However, paediatric dental experts still maintain that refined sugar and the sticky foods that contain it are major problems.

The industry quotes studies from Britain showing that those who eat the most sugars consume the lowest levels of fat and vice versa. Some of these studies fail to distinguish between refined sugar and those that come naturally in foods such as fruits and milk, but a close inspection of these studies shows that people are either eating sugary foods such as soft drinks and lollies, or they are eating fatty foods such as potato chips and crisps. They suggest that of these two, choosing high-sugar foods is preferable to choosing high-fat foods.

A well-known paediatric dentist, giving a talk to the Sydney branch of the Nutrition Society in December 1997, suggested we should encourage children to reduce their frequency of eating sugary foods. When told by someone in the audience that this would mean an increase in intake of fatty foods, the dentist sensibly suggested that people could avoid both sugar and fat by choosing more fruits, breads, unsweetened cereals and fat-reduced milk or yoghurt.

In her campaign suggesting that sugar should be removed from the Dietary Guidelines, Dr Jenny Brand Miller says that "choosing to avoid sugar and eating unsweetened breakfast cereals, milk products, breads and low joule soft drinks, jams and jellies may actually be doing more harm than good...." She claims that "such a diet is more likely to be higher in fat, lower in satiety, higher in glycaemic index and more likely to cause weight gain than the diet which caters for the natural desire for sweetness and includes a moderate amount of sugar." This argument hinges on the supposed sugar-fat seesaw and ignores the fact that humans lived without refined sugar and obesity for most of human history.

The ANFs National Newsletter also fell for the sugar industry's marketing campaign in its February 1998 issue of Pabulum. An article praising sugar, says, for example, that we eat much less sugar than we thought. Apparent consumption data (representing sugar that is sold) just released has consumption at 46.6kg/person (1995-96) or 128g/person/day. According to a referenced statement in Pabulum - it is only 50-70g/day in adults and 40-50g/day in children. If you look up the reference, these figures come from what people report eating and its interpretation by very imperfect data collection tools. Whatever happens to the rest of the sugar?

We know from many studies using doubly-labelled water that the average person underestimates food intake by about 30%. The overweight underestimate their intake by about 50%. This does not mean that overweight people are untruthful, it simply means that they are not very good at estimating what they eat. Neither are health professionals. Comparing the fat content from foods listed on the Australian data base with actual servings derived from standard recipe books, we can see how far out we are. For example, the data base lists 300g of Thai chicken curry having 24g of fat whereas a typical recipe has 45g; a 400g serving of lasagne from an Italian restaurant is listed as 24g of fat, whereas typical recipes have 55g; a slice of chocolate cake is assumed to have 10g of fat while recipes suggest more than 80g. I could go on but the message is that we should take reports of what people are eating with a grain of salt. They get it wrong and so do we.

There is also a strange argument in Pabulum that higher sucrose intake is responsible for more dental decay in non-industrialised countries, but not in countries like Australia. What this, and the US reference from which it was derived, fail to appreciate is that appropriate dental care can remove undesirable effects that sugar can have on teeth. But not everyone has appropriate dental care. As Dr Richard Widmer has noted, the problem with dental decay is that 20% of the children have 80% of the decay. We need to look after the 20%, especially as they are among those who fall victim to marketing efforts.

I haven't come to any conclusions about marketing foods to children. What I have tried to do is to present the problems. Until and unless we understand them, I don't believe we can even approach the subject and at this stage, I don't think we have thought deeply enough about the subject. We need to consider that the form of agriculture, processing and distribution of food we now have is itself a problem. It is time we stopped ignoring such structural defects. Looking only at promotion, one layer of marketing with new schemes to attract children to particular foods, is like looking at splinters and ignoring logs.

The most important piece of information on a food label may well be the place of origin of its ingredients. Yet such information is not easy to discover and sections of the food industry have campaigned against it.

We may also need to know if the food was grown using pesticides and fertilisers or whether it is organic. Health professionals have tended to down rate organic growing because they can show that organic produce has no more vitamins than crops grown using pesticides and fertilisers. But organic gardening may be much more sustainable and therefore have benefits which should demand our support.

I would like to end on a positive note. Until recently, many of us blithely ignored many of the important aspects relating to food and its production, distribution and marketing. These are now increasingly being discussed. Sometimes pendulums have to swing a long way before people realise they need to act. This is now starting to happen, sadly brought into focus by the long drought that is currently crippling many farmers.

With excess weight, we have at last realised that rather than blaming the victim, we must re-structure the environment. Cycling paths, safe towns and cities where people can walk are now accepted as the way to tackle the growing problem of obesity in countries such as Australia. And with marketing healthier foods to children, we also need to examine the structure of our food supply and food policies.

We grow excellent foods in Australia, yet many manufactured foods consist of little more than air, water, fat and/or sugar and artificial additives. We need to speak out for good food and against the useless (and not especially good-tasting) foods. We need to increase interest in 'real' food.

The groundwork is in place. People purchase food books, restaurant and food review sections rate highly in newspapers, the cooking pages sell women's magazines and top chefs earn big salaries.

We need to follow through on this interest in food and expand it to children. We need to encourage people to be interested in local foods and to accept that the best food is simple and unadulterated. We may need to get back to earth, teaching children how to grow foods, even if in old ice cream containers on the window of their home.

To succeed, we may have to reject some alliances with those whose aim is to market flavoured air and water. But we could take up other alliances. Nutritionists could work more with home economics teachers and chefs, we could have a National Day of Taste in schools, similar to that in France where chefs and other interested people go into schools and teach children about flavour of local foods. Our multicultural society could make this a wonderful way to market all that is good in Australian foods. We could even get Aboriginal people with expertise about bush foods to teach us more about them. When a group of people accept another group's foods, they tend to accept the people.

The way forward in our day-to-day selling of good food is really quite simple. But the most difficult of ideas to market are those that are simple. Too many people have too much at stake to allow it.

Many urban populations don't know or care where their food comes from or how it is produced. Perhaps we should 'market' such information to our children so that they might become what Professor Tim Lang has called 'food citizens' rather than simply those who consume whatever the mighty market to them.

I used to think such ideas were utopian. I don't think so any more. We have had a great lesson in how community standards can change with smoking. Who would have thought 25 years ago that we would ever have had people not smoking in the workplace, on public transport and in public buildings. Surely, it won't be so difficult to have people eating the wonderful array of fresh foods that are now grown in Australia. But the anti-smoking lobby worked hard to achieve their goals, and we will need to do the same. But it can be done - and where better to start than with selling these ideas to children.

To this end, I propose that we lobby for programs to teach children:

• about growing food in a sustainable way
• about cooking and shopping
• about packaging & re-cycling
• about nutrition
• encourage more honest food labelling, with information on
• genetically engineered ingredients
• pesticides used
• origin of ingredients
• meaningful nutritional information

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