Healthy fast food advertisements aimed at kids go unnoticed, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
With obesity on the rise, U.S. fast food restaurants agreed in 2009 to start promoting healthy options for children. Now, a study shows that their target audience is failing to get the message.
For example, children seem to have a difficult time differentiating between apple and French fries in commercials.
"And I see some... are those apple slices?" one girl involved in the study asks, according to a news release. When the researcher doesn't reply, the girl decides, "I think they're French fries."
The research team, from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center in New Hampshire, presented children between the ages of 3 and 7 with images from fast food TV ads that appeared on the Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and other kid-focused cable networks from July 2010 to June 2011.
About half of the children did not recognize milk when it was shown in McDonald's and Burger King ads, and only 10 percent of them determined the sliced apples in Burger King's ads were in fact apples and not French fries.
Childhood obesity has more than doubled in the United States over the last 30 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed. And according to Medical News Today, one in three U.S. children has high cholesterol.
These industries may have good intentions to help fight the obesity epidemic, but they may not be so effective.
"The fast food industry spends somewhere between $100 to 200 million dollars a year on advertising to children," Dr. James Sargent, the study's lead author, said. "Ads that aim to develop brand awareness and preferences in children who can't even read or write, much less think critically about what is being presented."
And even if kids do understand these commercials, they can be ambiguous.
"Burger King's depiction of apple slices as 'Fresh Apple Fries' was misleading to children in the target age range," Sargent said. "The advertisement would be deceptive by industry standards, yet their self-regulation bodies took no action to address the misleading depiction."
