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In an effort to fight obesity, public health researchers have been trying for decades to find a way to convince teenagers not to consume empty food and eat healthy, but to no avail. The huge volume of food marketing that children are exposed to every day is one of the biggest hurdles. This marketing is designed to promote strong positive associations with junk food in the minds of kids and to lead to overeating – and research has shown that it works.
Now, a new study from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago reveals that a simple, brief intervention can offer teens lasting protection against these adverse effects of marketing food products.
In the study, "A Value Alignment Intervention Protects Adolescents from the Effects of Food Marketing", published today in Nature human behavior, Christopher J. Bryan of Chicago Booth, David S. Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin, and Cintia P. Hinojosa, Ph.D. candidate at Booth, discover that reframing the way students envision food marketing campaigns can encourage teens, especially boys, to make healthier daily diet choices. an extended period of time. The method works in part by exploiting the natural desire of teenagers to rebel against authority.
"Food marketing is deliberately designed to create positive emotional associations with junk food, linking it to feelings of happiness and fun," said Bryan.
Among the two most important discoveries of the experiment: the intervention has brought about a lasting change in the immediate emotional, intestinal and intimate reactions of boys and girls, facing the marketing messages of junk food. And teens, a group notoriously difficult to convince when it comes to giving up junk food, have begun choosing healthier foods and beverages at their school cafeteria.
"One of the most exciting things is that we have encouraged children to have a more immediate negative bowel reaction to junk food and junk food marketing, and a more immediate positive intestinal reaction to healthy foods," Bryan said.
A preliminary study was conducted with eighth grade students from a Texas high school in 2016. Researchers went to classrooms and asked a group of students to read an article factual in revealing fashion on the big companies of the food sector. The article described companies as manipulative marketers who were trying to entice consumers to take junk food addictive to gain financial gain. The reports also described misleading product labels and advertising practices targeting vulnerable populations, including very young children and the poor.
A separate group of students, consisting of control students, have received traditional health education materials from existing materials regarding the benefits of healthy eating. The researchers found that the lecture group had chosen fewer junk food snacks and chose to drink water instead of sugary sodas the next day.
In the new study, released today, teenagers first read the marketing presentation material and then did an activity called "Make It True" to reinforce the negative image of food marketing. . Students received images of food ads on iPad with instructions for writing or drawing on ads (graffiti style) in order to turn ads from fake to fake.
The latest study, which used a new eighth-grade sample, revealed that the effects of the marketing-exposed intervention had persisted until the end of the school year, or three months. The effects were particularly impressive for boys, who reduced their daily purchases of unhealthy drinks and snacks in the school cafeteria by 31% over this period compared to the control group.
This relatively simple intervention could be an early sign of a public health game changer.
"One of the most exciting things is that we have encouraged children to have a more immediate negative bowel reaction to junk food and junk food marketing, and a more immediate positive intestinal reaction to healthy foods," Bryan said.
Appealing to the natural drive of adolescents to "stick to humans" and their higher sense of developmental equity may finally allow the public health community to compete with better-funded junk food marketers. This short, inexpensive and easily scalable intervention appears to offer lasting protection against the seductive power of junk food marketing and change eating habits for the better.
"Most past interventions seemed to presume that informing teens of the long-term adverse consequences of a bad diet on health would be an effective way to motivate them to change their behavior," said Bryan. "This is clearly a problematic assumption, and we thought that this could be the main reason why no one was able to convince teens to make a lasting change to their eating habits."
The study was less conclusive about the effect of the intervention on cafeteria purchases of adolescent girls. Although, like the boys, the girls immediately felt more negative about their untimely reaction to junk food after the intervention of the talk, their daily shopping at the cafeteria was similar, as they read the news. Presentation, or traditional health education material.
What is not clear, is if similar purchases mean that neither of the two interventions improved girls' dietary choices or that both were effective in girls, but for different reasons. The researchers suspect that if traditional health education is totally ineffective to change the behavior of boys, it could influence girls' choices as it mentions calories, which could trigger a slender social pressure. If this is the case, this suggests that the presentation could also be a preferable option for girls because it allows to achieve similar results with less risk of shaming the body.
"This study shows that it is possible to change behavior in adolescence by using a mild intervention," Yeager said. "Adolescence is a phase of development in which even the longest approaches to health promotion have had virtually no effect.Because of many social problems, ranging from l? "Risk behavior education, rooted in adolescence, this study paves the way for solutions to some of the thorny challenges for promoting global public health."
"Food marketing is deliberately designed to create positive emotional associations with junk food, linking it to feelings of happiness and fun," said Bryan. "What we did was reverse the trend of food marketers by exposing this manipulation to teenagers, causing their strong natural aversion to being controlled by adults. If we could educate more children about it, it could make a real difference. "
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