Abstract
Due to rising global rates of childhood obesity, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the adoption of policies to restrict children's exposure to the advertising of unhealthy foods and beverages. In 2017, the Slovenian government introduced regulations to restrict the advertisement of unhealthy foods and beverages during designated children's television programming. The objective of our study was to assess the impact of these regulations on children's exposure to food advertising, including during children's programmes and at peak viewing times for children. Using a standardised methodology, we investigated a large sample of 6479 food advertisements broadcast during 1652 h of television programming between 2016 and 2018 on the five most popular television channels for children aged 4–9 years. Advertised food products were coded using the WHO Regional Office for Europe Nutrient Profile Model, modified for Slovenia. The average overall frequency of not permitted (unhealthy) food advertising (±SD; standard deviation) per hour was 2.90 ± 3.22 (2016), 2.66 ± 3.55 (2017), or 2.13 ± 3.04 (2018) ads/h/channel. The frequency of not permitted food ads decreased to 0.02 ± 0.01 per h/channel during cartoons and other children's programmes in 2018. The new Slovenian food marketing regulations have reduced the advertising of unhealthy foods during children's programmes. However, children's viewership rates are also high outside of this designated programming and, as such, children's overall exposure to unhealthy food advertising is unlikely to have been reduced considerably by the regulations. Future policy interventions should be planned to cover not only children's programmes but also broadcasting periods that include the greatest numbers of child viewers. The implementation of such policies would be more challenging given that children's peak viewing times often intersect with prime time.
Highlights
Childhood obesity has been increasing in recent decades, making it a serious global public health problem
In Slovenia, evening cartoons are commonly aired before the 7 p.m. television news, so peak child viewing time extends into the after-news prime-time slot, which was mostly unaffected by the regulatory intervention
Our results showed that the regulatory intervention did not affect advertising in peak child viewing times because the restrictions only apply to children's programmes and not to peak child viewing times
Summary
Childhood obesity has been increasing in recent decades, making it a serious global public health problem. There is convincing evidence that exposure to this marketing affects children's food preferences, nutrition knowledge and consumption patterns (Cairns, 2019; Mau, Schramm-Klein, Schuhen, & Steinmann, 2019). This is especially concerning given that the marketed foods are typically those with an unfavourable nutritional composition: high in added salt, sugar and fats (Cairns, Angus, Hastings, & Caraher, 2013). The adoption of policies to reduce the impact of the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children was identified in the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Action Plan for the prevention and control of NCDs 2013–2020 (WHO, 2013). To support the harmonised monitoring of food marketing across different countries, a standardised protocol was developed by INFORMAS (Swinburn et al, 2013), the International Network for Food and Obesity: Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs)
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