Sweetened for kids through ads and false labels, and parents are buying

The aisle of drinks in any supermarket will lead you through hundreds of beverages, from soft drinks as well as sports drinks. The sections for children’s glasses are filled with an array of items and beverages. The majority of parents are looking to purchase items that are healthy for their kids. Still, there are so many choices within the beverage aisle it is often difficult to make a good decision, especially when drinks companies make it difficult to make the right choice.

I am an academic research scientist within the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. I’m a researcher at the Rudd Center for Health and Food Policy. I’ve been studying how food is promoted to children and parents of infants for over ten years. Businesses invest huge amounts of money advertising drinks for children that have added sweeteners. Despite the sweeteners, they advertise their drinks as healthy options for children.

In a recently published investigation, I co-authored along with colleagues from the Rudd Center, which examined the purchasing and advertising trends for children’s beverages from 2006 to 2017. We discovered, not by accident, that advertising spending influenced consumers to purchase the drinks that were advertised. The issue is that businesses invest tens of millions of dollars each year to promote sweetened beverages for children. This study was among the first studies to directly connect ad spending to purchases by households of harmful drinks. We also observed that people who had lower incomes were more attracted to the ads and bought more sweetened children’s beverages than households with more money.

The results of decades of research have shown that drinking excessive amounts of sweet drinks can increase your risk for heart disease and high blood pressure. type 2 diabetes, and dental decay. Advertising can boost businesses’ profits, but they do not affect children’s health.

Many of the commercials for alcohol are directed at children.

Demographics and advertising

The food and drink industry invests around 14 billion dollars annually in marketing their goods, and a majority of that advertising is for highly processed food items. It comprises “fruit drinks” – fruit-flavored drinks with little juice, such as SunnyD, as well as flavored waters, such as Capri Sunny Roarin’ Waters. They are both advertised as intended for children; however, they contain components that experts in the field of health advise children shouldn’t consume in any form, such as sweeteners, sugars added to diet sweeteners, or both.

In the year 2018, companies spent $21 million advertising the sweetened drinks across all channels in the U.S. They invested $18.5 million in marketing sweetened beverages for children via television ads. This was higher than the $13.6 million that companies paid for advertisements on TV for non-sweetened children’s beverages like pure juices, juices, and blends of water.

Advertising sugary drinks directly to children is another strategy that companies employ.

In 2018, children ages 2 through 5 watched more than twice as many television ads for sugary drinks for children as they did for non-sweetened juice products. Certain brands of fruit drinks target their ads disproportionately towards families with Spanish-speaking homes and Black youngsters. The packaging, too, is targeted at children, with drinks that are sweetened featuring more cartoon brands, characters from the brand, and bizarre names as compared to drinks with no added sweeteners.

This type of advertising could undermine children’s efforts to offer healthy beverages.

To assess the impact of this marketing, My colleagues and I examined 12 years of purchase information for each month. We discovered that households that have less income bought significantly more sweetened fruit beverages and fewer juices that were not sweetened than those in homes with more money. The non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic households also bought more sweetened drinks for their fruit than non-Hispanic white households. This is consistent with research showing that people of color and low-income communities consume more sugary beverages as compared to the other demographics and contributes to the wide disparities in the prevalence of diet-related diseases.