Children Targeted For Fast Food

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Recommended: Childhood obesity over the decades

Children Targeted for Fast Food by Advertisers Over the last few decades, fast food advertisers have realized that targeting the innocent minds of children bring more customers. A senator named Tom Harkin said “Corporate America…spends $12 billion [on advertising aimed at children] because that advertising works brilliantly because it persuades children to demand – to the point of throwing temper tantrums, if necessary – a regular diet of candy, cookies, sugary cereal, sodas, and all manner of junk food”. No matter what parents buy for their children, the children want and are fascinated by the toys that come with buying fast food, so the children persuade their parents to buy the fast food. Advertisers should not be permitted to target children, …show more content…

The children assume that they will become strong, healthy and fit like the models and characters used in the advertisements. For example, “Most advertising promotes unhealthy regular menu items and often takes unfair advantage of young people’s vulnerability to marketing, making it even tougher for parents to raise healthy children.” (Orciari). Food that are marketed and promoted in the advertisement usually contain high sugar, fat and high level sodium. Food industries use young children, cartoon characters, sports and Hollywood celebrities to market their food products. This kind of advertisement encourages children to go to their restaurants and eat the unhealthy food because if they buy that food, they will get toys. These restaurants spend millions dollars on advertisement and are successful in targeting children with that method since most children watch lots of television. There are many methods used in these television advertisements that appeal to children. The marketing of food is affecting the health of the children, as they end up eating unhealthy food which affects …show more content…

“Television was the predominant medium to reach youth, and quick service or fast food restaurants spent $154 million on television advertising aimed at the child demographic.” (Chabot). There are several advertisements related to marketing of foods to children. Some of the selected advertisement from Pepsi, M&M Candy, McDonald Kids Happy Meal, Crispy Cream Donuts, Cereals, Burger King’s Burger and fries and Oreo cookies. Children see this advertisement while watching cable TV and also on YouTube. All these advertisement targeted towards young kids promoting high fat food, soft drinks and other food containing sugar, fat and sodium. That’s why today the Obesity in childhood is a major problem around the world now specifically in developed countries like United States. When child has an excess amount of body fat that is when child’s weight is above the recommended weight based on gender, height and age then this condition is described as obesity. BMI – Body mass index calculation outcome determines when a person is overweight or not. There are many factors that cause obesity, such as genetic if parents are obese, lack of physical activities, unbalanced/unhealthy eating habits that is food with high fat or due to hormonal disorders. As mentioned it might be due to genetic if one of the parents is obese then child is at high risk on obesity compare to the child

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