Snacks Make Up 27% of Kids Calories
March 2, 2010
Reuters
Children snack so often that they are “moving toward constant eating,” Carmen Piernas and Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina reported.
More than 27 percent of calories that American kids take in come from snacks, Piernas and Popkin reported in the journal Health Affairs. The researchers defined snacks as food eaten outside regular meals.
The studies will help fuel President Barack Obama’s initiative to fight obesity in childhood, something Obama’s wife, first lady Michelle Obama, notes could drive up already soaring U.S. healthcare costs.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote a commentary calling for taxes on sugary drinks and junk food, zoning restrictions on fast-food outlets around schools and bans on advertising unhealthy food to children.
“Government at national, state, and local levels, spearheaded by public health agencies, must take action,” he wrote.
Piernas and Popkin looked at data on 31,337 children aged 2 to 18 from four different federal surveys on food and eating.
“Childhood snacking trends are moving toward three snacks per day, and more than 27 percent of children’s daily calories are coming from snacks. The largest increases have been in salty snacks and candy. Desserts and sweetened beverages remain the major sources of calories from snacks,” they wrote.
“Children increased their caloric intake by 113 calories per day from 1977 to 2006,” they added.
CONSTANT EATING
“This raises the question of whether the physiological basis for eating is becoming deregulated, as our children are moving toward constant eating.”
In a second study in the journal, Christina Bethell of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and colleagues analyzed data from the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health to find the rate of obesity for children 10 to 17 rose from 14.8 percent in 2003 to 16.4 percent in 2007.
The percentage of children who are overweight stayed at around 15 percent, they found.
“While combined overweight and obesity rates appear to be leveling off, our findings suggest a possible increase in the severity of the national childhood obesity epidemic,” Bethell said in a statement.
Parents, educators and policymakers all hold responsibility for this, Michelle Obama told the School Nutrition Association conference in Washington on Monday.
“Our kids didn’t do this to themselves,” Obama said.
“From fast food, to vending machines packed with chips and candy, to a la carte lines, we tempt our kids with all kinds of unhealthy choices every day.”
Other studies have shown that obese children are more likely to stay obese as adults, and they develop chronic conditions at younger ages, burdening the healthcare system.
“You see kids who are at higher risk of conditions like diabetes, and cancer, and heart disease — conditions that cost billions of dollars a year to treat,” Michelle Obama said.
The administration has launched an initiative to tackle the issue by improving nutritional standards, getting food companies to voluntarily improve nutrition standards, help kids exercise more and educating parents.
The effects extend beyond health. Bethell’s study found that overweight or obese children were 32 percent more likely to have to repeat a grade in school and 59 percent more likely than normal weight kids to have missed more than two weeks of school.
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Accidental Truth in Advertising
March 1, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Junk food advertising has reached a new low with the recent Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” ads which portray Doritos consumers as violent murderers who will kill fellow human beings to get a bag of Doritos.
One Doritos ad portrays a man backing out of a parking lot when his car strikes an innocent person who drops a bag of Doritos and falls to the ground behind the car. Rather than trying to help the innocent victim, this man throws his car into reverse and drives over the victim, killing him with the vehicle and stealing the bag of Doritos.
The message? Doritos are so valuable that it’s okay to kill people just to score a bag.
A second Doritos ad shows two loser-looking gym bums being attacked by an insane junk food ninja who uses Doritos chips as throwing stars to murder the guy who stole his bag of Doritos. The message here? Doritos are so valuable that it’s okay to kill others to defend your snack.
A third Doritos ad shows one elderly man attacking a young man with a stun gun in order to buy the last bag of Doritos from a vending machine. Same gratuitous violence. Same message: Committing violent acts against others is perfectly acceptable when you’re pursuing a bag of Doritos.
Yet another Doritos ad shows two grown men smacking each other in the face to decide which loser has to go buy more Doritos. The loser ends up with a black eye after being punched so hard he flies through the air and lands on a coffee table, shattering it. Gee, why not just use the women in this role and make it a wife-beating commercial?
A common theme: Violence against innocent people
What’s the common theme of all these Doritos television commercials? Acts of senseless violence committed against fellow human beings.
Doritos marketing executives apparently think these commercials showing gratuitous acts of violence and murder are going to help them sell more Doritos. Maybe they’ve been eating too much of their own product and their brain function has been suppressed by all the MSG found in Doritos… because these ads aren’t funny, they’re sick!
“Demented” might be a better term. It’s hard to see the humor when there’s so much realistic violence in the way. And yet somehow Frito-Lay executives gave these ads the big thumbs up. Let’s use violence to sell junk foods!
It sort of makes sense, actually: Junk food consumption is correlated with violent crime. Virtually all the criminals in prison across the country are nutritionally imbalanced due to their consumption of processed junk foods and their lack of sufficient nutritional supplementation. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a study revealed that fried snack foods like Doritos are a favorite food among violent criminals. These are, after all, the kind of people depicted in some Doritos advertisements.
In my view, the violent Doritos commercials accurately reflect the senseless, violent behavior that typifies people (younger males, mostly) who consume large quantities of processed junk foods, sugary soft drinks and gimmicky “sports drinks.” These are the people who end up being put on antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs, after which they sometimes end up in a school shooting rampage.
It might make a good Doritos commercial, actually: A kid grows up on junk food and diet soda laced with aspartame. He’s drugged up on Ritalin and Prozac. One day he brings a semiautomatic rifle to school, barges into a classroom and opens fire on his classmates, shooting and screaming, “I WANT MY F*@!KING DORITOS!”
Hilarious, huh? Some people think so. The Frito-Lay executives apparently think this kind of violence is appropriate for mainstream television. This is the kind of imagery they’re using to try to convince people to buy their products! How sick is that?
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Retail Stores Dropping Brand Names
February 17, 2010
CNN Money
By Parija Kavilanz
Don’t be shocked if you can’t find your favorite salad dressing or mouthwash on your next trip to Wal-Mart.
Large retailers — including Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500), the world’s biggest — are wrestling with having too many types of brand-name products. At the same time, shoppers are buying less and looking for bargains.
So unless a particular brand is a top seller in its category, it’s getting knocked off the shelf — and sometimes getting replaced by a cheaper store brand.
For example, Wal-Mart recently removed Glad and Hefty-branded storage bags from shelves, replacing them with its own lower-priced Great Value brand, according to the parent companies of both products.
In the case of Hefty, parent Pactiv Corp. (PTV) told CNNMoney.com that Wal-Mart reversed its decision, and will return its products to shelves this spring — after Pactiv agreed to make the Great Value bags that will sell alongside the competing Hefty product.
“Hefty was off Wal-Mart’s shelves, but we are being brought back,” said Matt Gonring, spokesman for Pactiv Corp.
Bill Pecoriello, CEO of market research firm ConsumerEdge Research, expects Wal-Mart and other sellers will trim several name-brands across categories in coming months, or negotiate deals to get better pricing.
According to Pecoriello, those categories at greatest risk of losing brands are everyday-type purchases such as household products, toiletries and food staples.
These are also categories in which retailers have aggressively pushed their own house brands.
“If you consider the economics of this, if Wal-Mart can build customer loyalty for its own brand, which is also cheaper-priced and cheaper to stock than name-brands, then it will,” he said.
Heavyweight
Moves such as this are significant given Wal-Mart’s heavyweight status in the retail industry.
“Any change that Wal-Mart makes with its product assortment has enormous implications for the entire industry,” said Ali Dibadj, senior analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Wal-Mart declined comment for this story.
Wal-Mart is not the only one doing this, according to Dibadj. He says leading drug store chains, including CVS and Walgreens, grocers such as Kroger (KR, Fortune 500), and Wal-Mart’s rival discounter, Target (TGT, Fortune 500), are also looking to simplify their store shelves.
In good economic times, product variety is a must for retailers. But in down times, when shoppers aren’t buying much, variety can be a burden.
“Wal-Mart’s a little fed up,” said Lora Cecera, retail expert and partner at strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group. “I think the feeling is that as these companies keep extending their [product] lines, it’s only causing confusion for shoppers and not really driving them to buy more products.”
As a consumer, she asked, “Do I really need to decide between 15 different types of toothpaste when I go to a store?”
Dawn Willoughby, vice president-general manager of Glad brand for the Clorox Co. (CLX, Fortune 500), agreed.
“On an industry level, we’ve been talking about simplifying product assortment for a long time,” said Willoughby. “If you walk into a Wal-Mart or another large retail chain, there are so many products on shelves that it does make it harder to shop.”
Let’s make a deal
Besides cutting clutter, industry experts say Wal-Mart and other retailers are looking for more lucrative deals from suppliers on both prices and advertising.
In one recent example, according to published reports, Wal-Mart removed Arm & Hammer liquid laundry detergent from most of its stores. But the discounter brought back the product after Arm & Hammer boosted its advertising for the product at Wal-Mart.
Arm & Hammer parent Church & Dwight (CHD) did not return calls for comment. Other consumer product makers — including Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble — either declined comment or did not return calls.
Said Dibadj, “Perhaps one consideration in which product to cut is based on which company gives [Wal-Mart] the best deal.”
Citing the Hefty example, he said “these threats can become quite aggressive, such as delisting and subsequent relisting after a compromise.
Altimeter Group’s Cecera believes consumers stand to win from the retailers’ moves.
“In this recession, consumers have certainly become less discriminating with what they buy,” said Cecera. “Consumers have rushed to value prices, and they are buying generic brands.”
She said retailers’ own brands have grown their market share by between 2% to 6%.
This newfound affection for store brands is “sticking,” said Dibadj. He cites his firm’s recent survey finding that 77% of consumers who traded down to less expensive private label products are happy with their decision.
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Online Junk Food Ads Preying on Teens
February 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gurierrez
Teenagers are strongly affected by Internet marketing in a way that has yet to be addressed by scientific research or government regulation, a group of scientists has warned in a review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
“As the media marketplace continues its rapid transformation, becoming a ubiquitous presence in young people’s lives, further academic research is needed to understand fully the nature, scope, and extent of interactive advertising’s impact on youth,” the researchers wrote.
According to the paper, the United States still regulates advertising to children and teenagers based on studies conducted in the 1970s on how television influences young minds. The authors said that the Internet is a fundamentally different medium than television, however.
“In the Internet era, children and teens are not passive viewers; they are active participants and content creators in an interactive digital environment that pervades their personal and social lives,” they wrote.
Advertisers have specifically targeted teenagers for Internet marketing, particularly of food and drink. Teenagers are significantly more impulsive in their purchasing than younger children or older adults, and spend an average of $46 online each month. They are significantly more likely to participate in online marketing campaigns than other age groups.
Self-imposed regulations by junk food and other manufacturers fall far short of what is needed, researchers said. They criticized these initiatives, in part, for being “narrowly focused” on children younger than 12.
“Although this model may have been appropriate when television was the primary advertising medium, it has limited utility for addressing the changing media and marketing landscape. Nor does it provide guidance for understanding the role of adolescents in the digital marketplace,” the scientists wrote.
The federal government recently made moves to address junk food marketing to teenagers when it created the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children. The mandate of this group includes all children through the age of 17.
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Johnson & Johnson Skim Cream Ad Banned After Makeup In “After” Shots
January 6, 2010
The Guardian
By Mark Sweney
A TV campaign for a face cream that promised to make skin look blemish-free has been banned by the advertising watchdog because the “after” shots were achieved using makeup.
The television campaign, for Johnson & Johnson, promoted the company’s Clean and Clear Spot Control Kit.
The campaign, created by ad agency DDB London, cited a trial with 30 girls using “before and after” shots and their testimonials to show the effectiveness of the anti-spot cream. “A clinical study showed 100% of people had improvement in just one day,” ran a voiceover. “After four weeks, they all had fewer spots, reduced redness and much clearer skin.”
The Advertising Standards Authority received two complaints challenging whether the images of the actresses “before and after” could be achieved using the product.
Johnson & Johnson said that the girls used were over 16 and were not models or actors. In the before shots all makeup, except eye makeup, was removed. However, for the “after” shots, Johnson & Johnson admitted that a “light powder” was applied to the girls’ skin to “remove shine from the T-zone” of the face.
The company said it did this to make sure that “the shininess did not detract from the results on the improved clarity of skin”. Johnson & Johnson said that the shots were representative of the results that can be achieved with the product.
However, the ASA said that it “noted a marked difference in the appearance of the clarity of skin between the before and after shots”.
“We considered that, in order to make the before and after comparison fair, both shots should have been taken under the same conditions (both without makeup) to ensure that any visible improvement was an accurate representation of what could be achieved with the product,” said the ASA.
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The Cost of Drug Advertising Raising Healthcare Costs
December 11, 2009
Natural News
By Paul Louis
Prescription drug ads are banned in all industrialized nations except New Zealand and the USA. Yet most off those other nations have effective medical care programs while managing to keep costs from soaring. In 1997, the FDA opened the floodgates to prescription drug advertising in the USA. This was based on an earlier Supreme Court decision that said restricting such advertising was illegal.
Last summer, some U.S. Congress members were mounting campaigns to refute the Supreme Court’s decision by restricting prescription drug advertising. In August of 2009, the New York Times selected a panel of eight highly qualified individuals for its “Editorial Room for Debate” section and posed the following two questions:
How much harm do prescription drug ads do to consumers? Are these ads a valuable way to educate people?
All but one panelist agreed that commercials and ads for prescription drugs were harmful and should be banned or at least restricted for a variety of reasons. The lone dissenter in the panel claimed that TV ads for prescription drugs educate and empower.
Disputing that premise, another panel member pointed out that people in countries banning prescription drug ads are better educated about health matters than Americans. Another panel member cited the deaths and heart problems from Vioxx created by Merck’s aggressive advertising campaigns before Vioxx’s safety could be determined.
The general consensus of the panel was that drug ads, especially TV commercials, tend to create a pill popping public rather than health conscious citizens. (Patients often demand advertised pharmaceuticals from their doctors!) Big Pharma’s annual advertising budget is double the federal budget for the FDA.
So how does this advertising outlay from drug companies affect the market? The cost of advertising is included in drug pricing. But the drug makers insist that their high advertising budgets create more sales, thus enabling prices to drop.
A recent study seems to disprove that assertion. Michael Law headed up a group in The Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia and looked into the connection between advertising and product costs. The team studied advertising expenses and pharmaceutical sales data for Plavix or clopidogrel.
Plavix is often dispensed to senior citizens for heart conditions. Law’s group focused on 27 Medicaid programs from 1999 through 2005. Their study, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, concluded that product costs went up, yet there was no increase in sales to help lower costs.
From this study, it’s easy to conclude that pharmaceutical advertising expenses contribute to the soaring costs of health care while encouraging the public to pop pills for every symptom imaginable.
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Nickelodeon Advertising Under Fire – Nearly 80% of Food Ads Unhealthy
November 25, 2009
CBS News
Nickelodeon may be a kid-friendly network, but when it comes to nutrition they are serving up the wrong ads.
According to an analysis conducted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), “nearly 80 percent of food ads on the popular children’s network Nickelodeon are for foods of poor nutritional quality.”
During an obesity epidemic in the United States, it’s hard enough for parents to control what their children are eating – and the group says airing a lot of junk food ads on Nickelodeon doesn’t help.
Although the findings show a modest drop from about 90 percent in 2005, it’s not significant enough to make a dent.
The CSPI points out that between the 2005 and 2009 studies, the food industry instituted a self-regulatory program through the Council of Better Business Bureaus, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI).
But for junk food lovers, self-regulation doesn’t always work.
CSPI took a closer look at the practices of the food companies that participate in that self-regulatory program.
They found that “of the 452 foods and beverages that companies say are acceptable to market to children, that 267, (or nearly 60 percent), do not meet CSPI’s recommended nutrition standards for food marketing to children.”
The list includes: General Mills’ Cookie Crisp and Reese’s Puffs cereals, Kellogg Apple Jacks and Cocoa Krispies cereals, Kellogg Rice Krispies Treats, Campbell’s Goldfish crackers and SpaghettiOs, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and many Unilever Popsicles.
“While industry self-regulation is providing some useful benchmarks, it’s clearly not shielding children from junk food advertising, on Nick and elsewhere,” said CSPI nutrition policy director Margo G. Wootan. “It’s a modest start, but not sufficient to address children’s poor eating habits and the sky-high rates of childhood obesity.”
Drug Ads Costing Us Money in Heathcare
Novemeber 25, 2009
Reuters
When consumer advertising began for the popular blood-thinner Plavix, Medicaid insurance programs for the poor and disabled spent millions more on the drug, even though the ads did not tempt doctors to write more prescriptions, researchers reported on Monday.
They said the study suggested that while ads might not directly increase the number of prescriptions, they still affect the cost of publicly funded healthcare because drugmakers appear to build the cost of the ads into their prices.
“Consequently, payers and policymakers should appropriately still be concerned about direct-to-consumer advertising for publicly funded reimbursement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid,” Michael Law of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The team studied pharmacy data on Plavix or clopidogrel, the $9 billion-a-year seller made by Sanofi-Aventis (SASY.PA) and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY.N). They looked at 27 Medicaid programs from 1999 through 2005.
Plavix is used widely to treat heart attack patients. It works in a similar way to aspirin by stopping platelets — tiny blood cells vital for the normal clotting process — from clumping together.
From 1999 to 2000, there were no consumer-directed ads for Plavix. But from 2001 to 2005, U.S. advertising spending for Plavix topped $350 million, or an average of $70 million a year.
During the study period, doctors servicing Medicaid patients did not change the prescribing trends, but the amount of money spent by Medicaid on the drug rose dramatically.
Drug Ads Drive Up Health Costs
November 23, 2009
Reuters
by Peter Cooney
When consumer advertising began for the popular blood-thinner Plavix, Medicaid insurance programs for the poor and disabled spent millions more on the drug, even though the ads did not tempt doctors to write more prescriptions, researchers reported on Monday.
They said the study suggested that while ads might not directly increase the number of prescriptions, they still affect the cost of publicly funded healthcare because drugmakers appear to build the cost of the ads into their prices.
“Consequently, payers and policymakers should appropriately still be concerned about direct-to-consumer advertising for publicly funded reimbursement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid,” Michael Law of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The team studied pharmacy data on Plavix or clopidogrel, the $9 billion-a-year seller made by Sanofi-Aventis (SASY.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). They looked at 27 Medicaid programs from 1999 through 2005.
Plavix is used widely to treat heart attack patients. It works in a similar way to aspirin by stopping platelets — tiny blood cells vital for the normal clotting process — from clumping together.
From 1999 to 2000, there were no consumer-directed ads for Plavix. But from 2001 to 2005, U.S. advertising spending for Plavix topped $350 million, or an average of $70 million a year.
During the study period, doctors servicing Medicaid patients did not change the prescribing trends, but the amount of money spent by Medicaid on the drug rose dramatically.
Al Franken Working to Stop Big Pharma
October 28, 2009 by JP
Filed under Government
October 28, 2009
WalletPop
By Jami Bernard
New legislation introduced by, among others, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), would cut off the federal tax deduction for drug companies that make those “direct-to-consumer” ads, the ones on TV convincing you to pop prescription drugs like candy.
There’s plenty to hate about those ads. They’re ubiquitous, for one thing. They manage to be misleading without being downright untrue. They play into the “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” category, because you’ve got people self-diagnosing without understanding that, in some cases, the side effects can be worse than the underlying condition. (“Death” is one of those annoying side effects.)
The proposed legislation also runs the risk of a side effect that Franken and his cohorts may have not considered: By yanking the financial incentive to run these ads, what will become of TV’s nightly news shows?
The audience for the nightly news on CBS, ABC and NBC has been shrinking and graying, like laundry that has been through too many spin cycles. The shows cost millions of dollars to produce. A half-hour news program is paid for by eight minutes of advertising.
Regular news watchers already know that most of those eight minutes are taken up by men with erectile dysfunction getting lucky after taking Cialis, or women being gently lulled to sleep by the Lunesta moth.
Drug companies currently get a tax break to make and market that kind of stuff. They’re called “direct-to-consumer” (or DTC) ads, but the consumer is only a means to an end.
The ads routinely beg you to “ask your doctor” for a prescription. It’s the doctor those ads are after, not you. They’re speaking to those doctors through you, much the way supermarkets put chocolate-coated “breakfast cereal” on the lower shelves to be at eye level with the kiddies. “Ask your doctor” is the same as “throw a tantrum for your mother until she buys you what you want.”
I can understand Franken’s point — that Big Pharma shouldn’t be making money from using consumers as pawns to achieve their profit margins. But print and TV journalism is already in big trouble.
According to Consumer Reports, drug companies spent $5.375 billion on advertising in 2007. While every dollar spent advertising osteoporosis drug Reclast resulted in just six cents of sales, every dollar spent advertising cholesterol drug Lipitor brought in $59.78 in sales. Without the tax break, you can be sure they’ll reconsider how much airtime to buy on the nightly news.
Without those ads, the news shows will have to cut costs. Soon, they’ll be lucky to maintain a news bureau in midtown Manhattan, let alone Afghanistan.
On one hand, the death of print and TV journalism means a loss of some of the standards of reporting that have not yet become de rigueur on the Web (such as sourcing and fact checking).
On the other hand, the explosion of DTC advertising from drug companies has resulted in lot of people overmedicating — why, just the other day, my leg twitched and I just knew it had to be Restless Leg Syndrome, not the six-shot venti Americano I had at 5 p.m.
I’m not saying Franken should withdraw the proposed legislation. I’m asking a general question that so far has no answer: Why is it that the consumer always gets the shaft?
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