Australian children are being exposed to aggressive marketing of foods that are rated too unhealthy for young people in many other countries, new research has shown.
A study led by researchers at the George Institute for Global Health published on Wednesday in Public Health Nutrition shows a direct correlation between packaged foods with low nutritional value and high use of marketing directed at children.
The study found over 95% of these foods which employ techniques directly marketed to children in Australia would be banned in Mexico because they are considered too unhealthy to promote to young people.
In 2020, Mexico introduced compulsory warning labels for every food product that exceeds thresholds for energy, salt, fat and sugar. Foods which carry any warning label cannot be marketed to children, either on the front of the pack or in other media advertising.
In contrast, Australia’s food marketing regulations are voluntary and do not include any restrictions on supermarkets such as Coles and Woolworths on the use of characters and celebrities, graphics, giveaways and competitions on packaging that appeal to children.
Prof Simone Pettigrew, a senior author of the study, said without any regulation of marketing directed at children, the food industry is taking advantage of kids’ “pester power” which is shown to have a statistically significant impact on parents’ choices when supermarket shopping.
“We’re effectively allowing the food industry to combine ‘pester power’ through children’s emotional connection with characters, with their biological preference for sweet and salty foods. With no legislative protections, this is a public health disaster in the making,” Pettigrew said.
The study found the unprecedented availability and aggressive marketing of ultra-processed, packaged foods and beverages is a key driver of childhood obesity. Approximately one in four Australian children and adolescents are overweight or obese.
The researchers analysed over 8,000 products across eight categories selected because of a higher proportion of child-directed promotions on their packaging. They used 2019 data from the George Institute’s FoodSwitch database, which collects nutritional information on the majority of packaged foods sold in Australian supermarkets.
They included Nestlé Milo Duo and Nutri-Grain cereal, Bega Stringers cheese sticks, Haribo Starmix and Doritos corn chips.
The researchers then assessed the number of products displaying child-directed promotional techniques by coding for 10 techniques including the use of cartoon characters, gifts and contests, and unconventional packaging. They found more than one in 10 (11.3%) products displayed at least one marketing technique which was directed at children.
The most common technique was personified characters (512 instances), followed by references to childhood life such as references to “fun” and the depiction of playground equipment (187), figures of children (145), licensed or branded cartoon characters (124) and names that specifically reference children such as labelling the product for “kids” (93).
The researchers assessed the healthiness of products which used marketing directed at children using four measures – the Australian Health Star Rating system, the Nova classification system for degree of processing, the World Health Organization’s nutrient profiling model for the western Pacific region and the Mexican nutrient profiling model. They found “products using child-directed promotional techniques received poor scores on all four indicators”.
Only 6.1% of products would be eligible to be marketed to children under the WHO model and only 4.5% if Mexican criteria were applied – meaning if Australia were to adopt similar legislation to Mexico, 95.5% of products would have to remove their child-directed marketing elements.
While Australia has a health star rating system rather than warning labels like Mexico, Pettigrew said the same principle could be applied: “You set a threshold, and you say these foods are not healthy enough to be marketed to children.”
Terry Slevin, the chief executive of the Public Health Association of Australia, said Australia needs to follow the lead of other countries regulating against unhealthy foods being marketed to children, as “the only way that is going to be stopped is through regulation”.
Slevin said any response at the moment “seems extraordinarily slow”.
“This research points to the tricks industry uses, particularly to kids. It sets them on the wrong path nutritionally, contributing to rates of overweight and obesity, as well as contributing to a tsunami of chronic diseases we see in our hospitals,” Slevin said.
Independent MP for Mackellar, Sophie Scamps, a former GP, introduced the healthy kids advertising bill 2023 to parliament in June aiming to protect children from junk food marketing.
“The George Institute’s latest research is further evidence that food companies are deliberately targeting children in their marketing of unhealthy foods,” Scamps said.
“It’s time government stepped in … to create an environment for our children to thrive in, not one where they are preyed upon for profit and paying for it with their health.”
