Yet Another Study Blames Food Companies for Parental Choices

[Kamaji]

Yet Another Study Blames Food Companies for Parental Choices

Food companies don't determine what parents put in their shopping carts.

BAYLEN LINNEKIN
5.7.2022

A new study on food marketing and kids, published this week in JAMA Pediatrics, concludes, as a UPI report this week explains, that "[e]xposure to food and beverage marketing and advertising boosts consumption of these products appreciably among children and adolescents."

Study co-author Emma Boyland of the University of Liverpool tells UPI the "research is further robust evidence that unhealthy food marketing has detrimental effects on eating and related behaviors in young people." Boyland and her co-authors conclude the study by arguing their findings "support the implementation of policies to restrict children's exposure to food marketing." That's despite the fact, as I've explained many times, that such food-policy interventions are as notoriously invasive as they are ineffective.

But this JAMA Pediatrics study seemingly was always going to conclude otherwise. Indeed, the study was intended to bolster and update recommendations by the World Health Organization (WHO), which funded the study. Per the study, the WHO currently recommends "that member states enact policies to restrict children's exposure to unhealthy food marketing." The new study was intended "to inform the development of updated recommendations to restrict food marketing to children."

For their research, the authors searched through more than twenty scholarly databases to identify relevant studies published between January 2009 and March 2020. They identified dozens of relevant existing articles, which comprised the research cited in their meta-analysis.

"Children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the effects of food marketing given their immature cognitive and emotional development, peer-group influence, and high exposure," the study argues.

I've read through dozens of similar studies over the years, and I find their cognitive dissonance startling. Kids might be "particularly vulnerable" to food marketing, but they aren't the ones who buy food (or toys, for that matter). That choice is left to parents or guardians—who have authority over food choices and, even more importantly, money to buy food.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2022/05/07/yet-another-study-blames-food-companies-for-parental-choices/