Brain scans show children are influenced by food advertising

Children’s food choices are influenced by food advertising, according to a new study that looked at brain activity after watching commercials. The kids who participated also based their choices on tastiness rather than healthfulness and made faster, more impulsive food choices after watching commercials.

Food marketing is often cited as a significant factor in the food choices of children and adolescents. Previous studies have shown there is a relationship between receptivity of food commercials and the choices people make, particularly in terms of the type and amount of food consumed.

Now research from the University of Kansas Medical Center and University of Missouri-Kansas City has examined kids aged between eight and 14 years-old by asking them to rate 60 food items on how healthy or tasty they were.

The children watched food and non-food commercials while Dr Amanda Bruce and her team studied their brain activity and undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), a neuroimaging procedure that measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.

“For brain analyses, our primary focus was on the brain region most active during reward valuation, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex,” says Dr Bruce.

During the brain scan, children were asked whether they wanted to eat the food items that were shown immediately after the commercials.

Taste was even more of an important factor to the children after watching food commercials compared with the non-food commercials. This means they made quicker decisions i.e. how quickly the children decided whether they wanted to eat the food.

Brain scans showed the ventromedial prefrontal cortices of the children were significantly more active after watching food commercials.

Dr Bruce notes the results show that watching food commercials may change the way children value taste which in turn leads to impulsive decisions.

“Food marketing may systematically alter the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms of children’s food decisions,” she added.

The study - “The Influence of Televised Food Commercials on Children’s Food Choices: Evidence from Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Activations”, is scheduled to be published in The Journal of Pediatrics.

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