Who teaches your children which foods to choose? You? Or Dora?
It probably won’t surprise you that the cartoon characters have more sway than you do. But it may surprise you to know just how much.
A new study says that 50 percent of children say that food products with animated characters on the packaging tastes better than the same exact food without the characters. And when allowed to choose, the vast majority of the children choose the package with the cartoons.
This might not be such a bad thing if the beloved characters’ images were only affixed to carrots, tomatoes and pears. But in many cases, they’re represented on food with little or no nutritional value.
Shrek is selling your kids junk food.
Characters are nothing new in the grocery aisles. Cereal boxes have been adorned with them for decades. But Captain Crunch doesn’t also have a Saturday morning cartoon series. The Lucky Charms dude doesn’t have a feature film. And Snap, Crackle and Pop limit their fundraising efforts to Rice Krispies – they don’t have toys or a clothing line that they’re also trying to pitch.
From CNN:
"Parents may not set out to buy unhealthy products," says the lead author of the study, Christina Roberto, M.S., a doctoral student at Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, in New Haven, Connecticut. "But kids can be really, really persuasive. They see them and they want them, and it gets difficult to have that battle in the grocery store."
The use of TV and movie characters on food packaging is "designed to access certain feelings, memories, and associations," says Dr. Thomas Robinson, M.D., a professor of child health at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. "If you associate certain products with things that are otherwise considered fun, it's going to make those products seem more desirable."
From ABC News:
Forty children from the New Haven, Conn., area were asked to do a taste test of gummy fruit snacks, graham crackers and baby carrots. One bite came from food in a plain package with a simple label, and one bite came from a similar package that also had a Dora the Explorer, Shrek or a Scooby Doo sticker on the front.
Both packages had the same brand of snack, but the children consistently said that the food from packages with cartoons tasted better, according to the study published today in the journal Pediatrics.
Children in the study were aged 4-6, and most of them could name the cartoon characters used in the study. Ninety percent of the children recognized Dora the Explorer, 77 percent recognized Scooby Doo and 60 percent of them recognized Shrek.
"The food industry spends $1.6 billion on youth-targeted marketing and, of that, 13 percent is dedicated to character licensing and cross-promoting," said Roberto, a post-graduate student at Yale University and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. "For the most part, these foods are of poor nutritional quality."
From a TIME Magazine blog:
The mixed messages may be confusing to kids and warrant further study, the authors suggest. For now, however, the authors argue that the use of cartoon characters on junk food packaging should be restricted: "Overall, our results provide evidence that licensed characters can influence children's eating habits negatively by increasing positive taste perceptions and preferences for junk foods. ... More than advocating the use of licensed characters for healthy foods, our findings point to the need to regulate and curtail the use of this marketing approach for high-energy, low-nutrient products."
The CNN Health story:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/06/21/cartoon.characters.junk.food/?hpt=Mid
The ABC News story:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/kids-food-tastes-cartoon-decorated-packages-study-finds/story?id=10957148
The TIME Magazine blog:
http://wellness.blogs.time.com/2010/06/21/are-cartoon-characters-coaxing-kids-to-eat-junk-food/?xid=rss-topstories