The Otago study was even worse than we realised

I blogged previously on the Otago University study that found kids are bombarded with 27 junk food advertisements a day. They of course used this to argue all such advertising should be banned.

Well Christopher Snowdon has for his sins read the entire paper and discovered it is even worse than we thought. He blogs:

The researchers put a small camera on a bunch of 11 to 14 year olds for a few days to see what they were seeing. The cameras took a photo every seven seconds and provided the researchers with 1.3 million frames of footage.

So this was based on video footage.

So the kids were ‘exposed’ to ‘non-core food marketing’ 27 times a day. But it transpires that the vast majority of the ‘marketing’ was not marketing as most people understand it and it was certainly not ‘advertising’, as the media reports claimed.

Of the 27 ‘exposures’, 17 involved nothing more that kids seeing food products, often while they were consuming them. 

Now just think about this. Their claim of 27 advertisements a day was based on the majority being that a kid sees a food product they are about to eat.

Amazing, isn’t it? Every time you think you’ve seen it all from the ‘public health’ racket they find a new way of flabbering your gast. Their latest wheeze is to portray kids glancing at the food they are eating as marketing.

How the hell did this study get $800,000 of taxpayer funding!

These ‘exposures’ make up two-third of the total. Most of the rest are signs inside and outside of shops, accounting for a further 7.6 frames per day. The number of actual advertisements seen is incredibly small. The kids saw an average of 0.2 ‘junk food’ advertisements on television per day and an average of 0.6 in print media.

So two thirds were kids glancing at food they were about to consume. Most of the remaining third was advertising in or on shops. Only a miniscule proportional were traditional advertisements.

No wonder the authors had to widen the definition of ‘marketing’ so dramatically. If they had actually looked at ‘junk food advertising’ they would have been forced to admit that kids hardly see any of it.

And then no more $800,000 grants.