My daughter brought home in her knapsack a new kids’ publication that was being handed out at school. It’s called “POP!” and offers up info on dinosaurs, nature and so on. As a former magazine editor (and now parent), I assessed the glossy paper and full-colour photos, then set out to determine where the money to produce POP! was from coming from. I didn’t have to look further than the ads for Cheestrings, Pop Tarts and Frosted Flakes (interspersed between the ads for the movies Ice Age: The Meltdown, Dreamer, and The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as for a new video game based on Over the Hedge). Now I get how the magazine industry works. But a children’s magazine featuring advertisements (cleverly disguised as educational) for junk food and videos? Where is the outrage? Studies have shown that children under the age of eight think that all advertisements are true. And those under five don’t understand that advertisements are trying to sell them something.
And yet we allow relentless marketing of junk food and videos to kids. It’s got to stop. Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor and author of What to Eat, calls the marketing of junk food to kids “extraordinarily subversive of parental authority.” She pointedly asks why we’re putting the power over food choices in kids’ hands. “How dare they do this?” she demands. “How dare they target six-year-olds for eating junk food?” It’s a question that, unfortunately, few of us ask, simply accepting that’s the way the world works. And we sit mutely while our kids get fatter, and get diagnosed more frequently with diabetes and learning disabilities.
We’ve got to stop the madness. Kids can’t always make healthy decisions based on critical thinking or analysis of long-term consequences. It’s why we don’t let them vote until 18. Or drink alcohol until 19. Yet we’ll expose them to ads that tell them “POP-TARTS pastries can be part of a nutritious breakfast.” Sure they can — as long as the other part of the breakfast is nutritious because POP-TARTS certainly aren’t contributing anything of value. Instead they’re offering up more than 80% of their calories as fat and listing sugar/glucose-fructose as the second ingredient. (Incidentially, when a prison for young offenders in the United States removed food products with high-fructose corn syrup – a ubiquitous ingredient that’s in virtually any junk food – the prisoners’ behaviour improved radically. There is increasing suspicion among researchers that many of our children’s “learning and behavioural disabilities” are diet-related.)
As a society, it’s unconscionable that we’re selling junk food to our children and setting them up for a lifetime of health issues. And marketers couch their junk food sales pitches in ads that feature instructions on performing a “bicycle kick” in soccer or, in the case of POP-TARTS, the promise that “a healthy diet gives you the energy to play, run, learn and laugh all day long.” What they don’t say is that kids should turn instead to fresh fruit, whole-wheat toast and organic milk for breakfast instead of any of the crap that’s being advertised on Saturday morning cartoons (have you ever seen a children’s ad for a perfect peach? Or a pint of just-picked strawberries? Didn’t think so.) And we parents need to stop giving in to the relentless demands of kids (fuelled by advertising) and make smarter choices about what we allow into our kids’ bodies. As noted author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) says, we need to start providing our children food, not food products.

To contact POP!, please e-mail publisher Beverley Paton and let her know that marketing junk food to children is unacceptable. popmag@patonpublishing.com