Abstract
Background/Objective:The World Health Assembly recommends that children's exposure to marketing of unhealthy foods should be reduced. Nutrient profile models have been developed that define ‘unhealthy' to support regulation of broadcast advertising of foods to children. The level of agreement between these models is not clear. The objective of this study was to measure the agreement between eight nutrient profile models that have been proposed for the regulation of marketing to children over (a) how many and (b) what kind of foods should be permitted to be advertised during television viewed by children.Subjects/Methods:A representative data set of commercials for foods broadcast during television viewed by children in the UK was collected in 2008. The data set consisted of 11 763 commercials for 336 different products or brands. This data set was supplemented with nutrition data from company web sites, food packaging and a food composition table, and the nutrient profile models were applied.Results:The percentage of commercials that would be permitted by the different nutrient profile models ranged from 2.1% (0.4%, 3.7%) to 47.4% (42.1%, 52.6%). Half of the pairwise comparisons between models yielded kappa statistics less than 0.2, indicating that there was little agreement between models.Conclusions:Policy makers considering the regulation of broadcast advertising to children should carefully consider the choice of nutrient profile model to support the regulation, as this choice will have considerable influence on the outcome of the regulation.
Highlights
Over the past three decades, childhood obesity has increased in prevalence in almost every country for which data are available.[1]Obesity in childhood is significantly associated with risks to physical and mental health,[2] and its increasing prevalence is a matter of grave public health concern
This paper addresses the following research question: do nutrient profile models designed for the regulation of broadcast advertising of foods to children agree on (a) the proportion of foods that should be advertised and (b) the type of foods that should be advertised? In this paper we compare nutrient profile models designed for the regulation of broadcast advertising of foods to children using a representative data set of food commercials that were broadcast in the UK in 2008, before the complete introduction of regulations on the broadcast advertising of foods to children in 2009.11
Each nutrient profile model provides a categorization for all foods, value judgements about which nutrient profile model will support the regulation will determine the balance of food advertising
Summary
Over the past three decades, childhood obesity has increased in prevalence in almost every country for which data are available.[1]. Obesity in childhood is significantly associated with risks to physical and mental health,[2] and its increasing prevalence is a matter of grave public health concern. Obese children are more likely to become obese adults.[3] The global obesity epidemic currently affects over 10% of the adult population worldwide.[4] Television advertising is known to be an important influence on children’s preferences for food and drinks[5,6,7]. Television advertising continues to be the most dominant promotional channel, and the food products promoted have an undesirable nutritional profile.[8] Such evidence has supported calls for the regulation of broadcast advertising of foods to children, and in 2010 the World Health Assembly passed a resolution endorsing
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