This is a YouTube video titled "How the Food Industry Targets Children" created in July 2019. It features a multi-speaker discussion including Dr. Sean Lucan, Kaya Perowne, Ask AI Mark, and Michael Moss. The content focuses on how the food industry aggressively markets unhealthy foods to children, especially targeting vulnerable communities, and the resulting health impacts such as obesity and related diseases. The discussion also covers regulatory efforts and the importance of involving children in healthy eating habits.
The food industry knows that if you get kids early and you set up their taste habits, patterns, behaviors in childhood, you've got a customer for life. And so, you get kids hooked on sugary, salty, fatty, unhealthful processed stuff. They're less amenable to trying the healthier things.
We live in a country where the food industry spends several billion dollars marketing junk food to children. All-star athletes and celebrities receive tens of millions of dollars from soda and fast food giants to promote their products, and research shows that the poor and minority children are targeted more aggressively by food marketing efforts. Hi, I'm Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. In this many episode, Dr. Hyman talks to researcher and family physician in the Bronx, Dr. Sean Lucan, about this important topic. He also speaks with Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Moss about Big Food's addictive mission to hook the most vulnerable consumers, our children, and keep them coming back for more. Let's turn now to Dr. Hyman's conversation with Dr. Sean Lucan.
We are one of the only westernized or civilized countries or developed countries that allow unrestricted food marketing to kids. And yet we do regulate things around children differently. And I think when it comes to children, and particularly given that 40% of kids are overweight now, that if a kid's a teenager who's obese or overweight, their life expectancy is 13 years less than somebody who's not at that age. There's an initiative in Chile, which you probably heard around, which is a sweeping set of reforms we've chatted about on the podcast before. One of the policies was eliminating any character cartoons from kids' marketing or any products, right? So, cereal boxes can't have superheroes or anybody else on there. They eliminated any advertising in movies, rent, radio, TV, I think even online for kids between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. And that they even put in an 18% soda tax but what was more impactful than all the other policies was eliminating the marketing. Like four-fold bigger impact which was shocking to me.
The food industry spends impossible amounts of money promoting, marketing, making available. Billions of dollars. The stuff that we just do not want patients eating are the things that are making patients sick, quite frankly. I mean, they're selling sickness. And to counter that, we need as many strategies as possible.
I mean, think about it. I think the data change by the name of 10 and $13 billion spent on just advertising and marketing poor quality food. And the worse the food is, the more marketing and advertising they devote to it. The drives behavior and the average kid sees 6,000 to 10,000 ads for processed junk food on TV and media. And probably now it's hard to measure, but through social media and stealth advertising, it's probably even more. It's more surreptitious. Even before they used to say, here's a picture of a baby in the 50s drinking 7-Up and Coca-Cola and how good it is to get them to drink their formula. That's obvious and terrible. Nobody would go for that. Now it's all subliminal, it's celebrities, it's kind of friend marketing, and it seems like it's authentic and natural, but it's not, and it's deliberate, and it's one of the drivers of so much of the behavior.
It's a problem. People have done studies looking at TV advertising and advertising on computer games and advert games and video, and all kinds of screen media, but there hadn't been a lot looking at the environment where you know, patients or particularly children are living, are playing, are going to school, are commuting back and forth. So we decided, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to go and see what was being promoted in the subway system and the subway stations? And so we rode every subway line in the Bronx, got off at every station and looked at every ad.
Wow.
And particularly we're looking for promotion of unhealthy foods and beverages. ads for unhealthful food products. So alcohol, sugar sweetened beverages, sugary cereals, processed foods, fast foods were disproportionately found in stations that were in neighborhoods home to communities that were challenged by, you know, various demographic and diet related issues.
More diabetes, more obesity, more poverty, lower.
Education, more children in the neighborhoods, more foreign born. more immigrants, right? So it turns out that those unhealthful ads were not related proportionately to the amount of foot traffic or the number of eyeballs. The inverse was true. So it wasn't that they were trying to reach the biggest audiences. They were trying to reach select audiences. And the select audiences that they seem to be trying to reach were those who are most challenged, right? So poor, minority, foreign born, children living in poverty.
So, this is important for people to just pause and understand what this is about. So, basically, these are areas where the worst affected by obesity, disease, poverty, where the minorities live, people who have lack of education and are the most burdened, yet by volume of people, the number of eyeballs, it wasn't the greatest. It was just the ones that were at most risk. Now, why is that happening? Because it's much easier for the food industry to sell people who are already eating poorly more bad food than have you or I start to eating Coca-Cola, drinking Coca-Cola or eating processed food or having junk. So, they target existing communities to create what they call heavy users. Michael Moss talked about in his book, Salt, Sugar, Fat, and this is, in my view, criminal.
One of my favorite characters in the book is Jeffrey Dunn for 20 years, one of the biggest biggest warriors in Coca-Cola. He rose to become president of Coca-Cola for North America, South America, and he walked me through, you know, those very marketing schemes that they used.
I mean, this was after he quit.
He had an epiphany at one point and decided- Couldn't live with himself anymore. Exactly. But one of those strategies is what they call up and down the street marketing, which refers to their trucks, like other snack food companies, driving from corner store to corner store, which in cities typically surround the schools and get the kids coming and going, and controlling the real estate in those stores. So it's the snack food companies that own the coolers, the racks up front near the cash register, and that's where the heavy salt, sugar, fat sort of snacking comes from, is they're controlling that very important space for kids, especially knowing that when a child goes in for the first time with their own spending money, they will become imprinted, brand loyal, and will start making a habit of that.
I mean, it seems that, you know, when you look at the science around how they develop these foods, that they're intentionally trying to create foods that hook people.
I mean, these are companies doing what all companies want to do, which is to make as much money as possible by selling as much product as possible. And they just happen to have some very smart people working for them to work on the marketing, on the packaging, on the ingredients, everything. They're going after potential consumers. And by and large, kids in the inner city have less choice about where to shop and they're going to be more exposed to the kind of marketing schemes that the companies use, especially those corner stores, which is huge for that. So that was the sense that I got is that they were going after kids because they were vulnerable because they're kids.
Our children are being bombarded by powerful marketing messages promoting food like substances or Frankenfoods as Dr. Hyman calls them. And we are now raising a generation of kids that do not know how to cook or feed themselves. Sending kids to school on a breakfast of Coke or colored sugar water and Doritos affects their ability to learn, their health, their future, and the future of our country and our world. To save our planet and save our children, we must stop this cycle. We have to help our kids fall in love with cooking. We know children need to feel included, and just like adults, they crave meaning and purpose. Involving your children in meal preparation helps connect them to their food and build better self-esteem. At the end of the day, setting a good example becomes the most important thing you can do. Walk the walk and talk the talk, and your kids will follow. I hope you enjoyed this mini-episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks for tuning in.
