Food Commercials for Healthy Foods

Pre-school children in the USA spend more time watching television than in any other activity except sleep. Children between 2 and 5 years watch approximately 27 hours of television per week. The potential influence on children’s behavior is dramatic since 1 out of every 5 hours of children’s television viewing is spent watching commercial messages designed to influence a child’s behavior. Over 50% of commercials aired during children’s viewing hours are for food-related items with the vast majority of these commercials promoting foods high in sugar, fat or salt and low in nutritional value. As children watch more television, their requests for and the family’s purchases of advertised foods increase.

Dr. Theresa Nicklas at the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center and her colleagues are attempting to determine if a television commercial promoting healthy foods could positively influence a young child’s preference and food consumption patterns. Promoting Food Commercials for Healthy Foods healthy eating behaviors through television commercials has the potential of reaching a large ethnically diverse audience in a cost effective manner.

Reggie Veggie         Judy Fruity

Currently the effectiveness of the “healthy” food commercials is being tested at the CNRC in Houston, Texas and the USDA/ARS Grand Forks Human Research Center in North Dakota. Although the research is still in progress, examples of the healthy food commercials in both English and Spanish can be seen at the CNRC website www.kidsnutrition.org/faculty/nicklas.htm.