05/08/07 Marketing Food For Kids

Marketing Food for Kids. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. We have all seen them and many of us have fell victim to them. Products in the stores that are marketed directly at kids. Bright packaging, popular characters boldly proclaiming BUY ME! I remember as a kid grabbing anything with Hopalong Cassidy or Superman on it and my dad being the softie he was, giving in to my demands. Recently, Sarah Colby, a nutritionist with the Agricultural Research Service took on the task of trying to understand the relationship between the marketing of products using nutritional claims and the reality of the products. COLBY: We were interested in looking at how often nutrition marketing; and I'm defining nutrition marketing as it can include health claims, nutrient content claims, or any other marketing that's using health or nutrition information that is beyond those minimum label requirements that's used on the labels of foods. We wanted to know how often those are used on foods that are high in saturated fat, sodium of sugar. According to Colby, this wasn't just a random sampling of a few products. COLBY: Almost 57-thousand foods that were looked at, we visually surveyed those; of those we found about 9-thousand products were perceived to be marketed towards kids meaning they had graphics that were targeting children or cartoon characters or toys or giveaways or a variety of things we used to define being marketed towards kids. And of those products that were marketed towards kids 78% had nutrition marketing. Colby says that those products use specific nutrition information as a hook to sell their products. But under the hook can be a product not really good for your kids. COLBY: Of those, 60% were high in saturated fats, sodium and/or sugar with more than half being high in sugar. Really that translates to about  almost 47% of foods marketed towards kids are high in saturated fats, sodium and/or sugar. While the marketing claims are not lies, Colby says that information can be misleading. COLBY: Some common things that you might see on a label are that it's a good source of calcium which is true, the problem is if the parent doesn't turn over the label and look at the nutrition information for the overall nutrient composition, that product may also be high in saturated fats, sodium and/or sugar and with the obesity crisis we have around the world, that's a concern. Tomorrow, more on food marketing towards kids. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.