Shrek lures kids to sugary snacks, not carrots

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/sc-nw-junk-food-0621-20100621,0,2042852.story

Shrek lures kids to sugary snacks, not carrots

Children can be influenced to eat sugary snacks that carry stickers of cartoon characters such as Shrek, Scooby-Doo or Dora the Explorer, but not healthier foods like carrots with similar stickers, according to a new Yale University study.

Researchers at Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity asked children ages 4 to 6 which snacks they wanted: gummy fruit, graham crackers or carrots labeled with stickers of the cartoon characters, or identical snacks without the stickers. They also asked them which tasted better.

Most of the 40 children wanted the snacks labeled with cartoon stickers. Most also said the gummy fruit and graham crackers with the stickers tasted better, but not the carrots.

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"We now have clear evidence of something many people suspected — that the use of these licensed characters has an impact on children's preferences in food," said Dr. Thomas Robinson, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Stanford University School of Medicine.

At a time when a third of all children in the U.S. are overweight or obese, the study underscores both the power of advertising to influence young children and the ineffectiveness of using the same techniques to convince them to eat more nutritious foods, the researchers said.

The practice of labeling foods with toys, characters and celebrities aimed at children and teens grew 78 percent from 2006 to 2008, according to the Rudd Center, but only 18 percent of those foods met nutritional standards for children. About two-thirds of the promotions came from manufacturers who had pledged to limit marketing to children under the Council of Better Business Bureaus' Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative in 2006.

This imbalance can turn grocery shopping into a battle of wills between parents and children, as SpongeBob, Nemo and Shrek wink from packages of sugary, fatty snacks placed low on grocery shelves.

Christina Roberto, a graduate student at Yale University and lead author of the study, said her results make a strong argument for removing licensed cartoon characters from all food packaging.

Robinson agreed. "I see parents who are extremely frustrated that living in this environment makes it very difficult to bring up a healthy child," he said.

Roberto said children might not prefer carrots with characters because they are not accustomed to seeing the stickers on healthy foods. Dora and SpongeBob first appeared on packages of fruits and vegetables in 2005.

Although marketing of unhealthy foods to children has increased, fresh fruit is currently the most popular snack food among children, said Harry Balzer, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group, a marketing research firm.

Vegetables are a tough sell, Balzer said. Vegetables last peaked in popularity as a children's snack in 1984, according to his research.

"You're not going to get a child to eat what they don't want to eat," he said.

British regulators in 2007 banned the use of licensed characters in television ads for unhealthy foods aimed at children. Similar action has not been taken in the U.S., but the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children, which is charged with placing limits on marketing to children, plans to issue its final report in July.

Robinson said the federal government has been reluctant to act because food manufacturers have so much influence. But that could change with the recently established Task Force on Childhood Obesity and the Let's Move campaign spearheaded by first lady Michelle Obama.

"People want to blame the parents, but the parents don't have billions of dollars to spend on counteradvertising," he said.

The study is being published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

xcxdlockwood@tribune.com

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