I love seeing the AP Press reports on days when articles like this hit my in box. Today, ten major food and drink makers including Campbell Soup, McDonald’s and Cocoa-Cola will be doing more to promote healthy foods and exercise in their child-oriented advertising campaigns.
These companies actually account for more than two-thirds of all child-targeted drink and food commercials on television. They are going to reduce the use of recognizable characters (think Little Mermaid, Shrek and others) in their unhealthy food campaigns. They will not advertise in schools. They will make sure that their online games (for advertising purposes) will only promote healthy products and at least half of their ads will focus on the foods that qualify as healthy as well as on nutrition and exercise.
Can it get any better than that?
Possibly, but these are huge strides forward for companies that have notoriously marketed their sugary products to every child old enough to watch a television screen. How many times have you had a child ask you to purchase a product because their favorite character was on it? Or how hard is it to explain to them that yeah, Ronald McDonald is a great guy, but his food is junk?
Just a few months ago the soda companies agreed to restrict their product sales to schools and just last month, five major snack food companies agreed to voluntarily restrict their own product sales to schools in an effort to combat childhood obesity.
Kids need to get the message about a healthy lifestyle and making positive choices in their eating habits and their exercise options. At the same time, it’s important for parents to do the same thing and for companies to voluntarily limit themselves is a great service because they don’t have to. It’s not their job to educate our children, but they are demonstrating some civic responsibility to hats off to them.
Other companies joining the first three are: Cadbury Schweppes USA, The Hershey Company, Kraft Foods Inc, PepsiCo Inc, General Mills Inc, Kellogg Co. and Unilever.
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