Saturday, October 31, 2009

Reacting to News of Abundance of Junk-Food Ads Consumed By Children, Oregon Nutrition Council Launches New Marketing Campaign

By: Roseanna Sonnenfeld

 

      A woman from the Office of Family Health has said that the Average American Child sees more than 40,000 advertisements a year.  Half of which are for food, most of which are for fast food, high calorie snacks, and sugared cereals. Because of this, Oregon Health Officials have announced that they will be launching a new public awareness campaign that is geared toward informing parents on how to counter against these non-nutritional ads founds all around children. 

 

      Ads are put up all around us to grab our attention and make us ultimately buy the product that is being advertised, whether it is good or bad for us.  When children see advertisements for non nutritional snacks, they don’t know that it may not be the healthiest thing for them to have but they do know that it looks good and that they want it.  So they plead with parents and sometimes may get the unhealthy food that they are wanting. 

 

      I think that launching this new public awareness campaign geared towards parents can be beneficial towards this subject matter but I also don’t think that it will be beneficial enough to make a huge impact on what kids are going to be eating or on what parents are going to buy their kids while at the grocery store.  Most parents today have so many things to get done within a day, whether it is running this kid to ballet and this one to soccer that they don’t have a lot of time to sit down and think about the healthiest snack that they could be buying for their children.  They get what is fastest and easiest which includes a lot of the time the fast food and the high calorie snacks.  So, the kids that are pleading with their parents now and are getting the unhealthy snacks will probably in the future continue to get those unhealthy snacks, even after this new campaign is launched.  While the kids whose parents buy only apples and fruit juice at the grocery store are going to continue to get those same healthy snacks because that is the routine they have already established.

 

Read more at http://tinyurl.com/yl36n68

 


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