JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Entertainment media content is often mentioned as one of the roots of children’s unhealthy food consumption. This might be due to the high amount of presented unhealthy foods in children’s media environment. However, less is known about the role of food placement centrality, that is, whether foods are interacted with it, consumed, verbally mentioned, or appear unobtrusively. We also lack longitudinal research measuring both, children’s unhealthy and healthy food consumption behaviors as outcomes.

Objective:

The aim is to connect content analytical data, based on children’s actual media diet, with panel data in order to explain children’s food preferences. Moreover, this study does not only focus on the amount of healthy and unhealthy foods children are exposed to, but also on how these foods are presented (i.e., centrally or not). Furthermore, we looked at the question of how parental co-viewing can diminish (enhance) the effects of unhealthy (healthy) food depictions, and we measured healthy and unhealthy consumption as dependent variables.

Methods:

We conducted a two-wave panel study with children and one of their parents (N=648, response rate: 36.84%) with six months in-between the two panel waves. We linked two-wave panel data of children and their parents to content analytical data of movies (N=113) and series (N=134; three randomly chosen episodes per series) that children were exposed to over the course of six months.

Results:

There was no significant relationship between exposure to unhealthy food presentations on unhealthy (b=0.008, P=.07) and healthy (b=-0.003, P=.57) food consumption over time. Also, healthy food presentations were unrelated to unhealthy (b=0.009, P=.18) and healthy (b=0.000, P=.99) food consumption over time. However, there was a significant positive interaction of exposure to unhealthy food presentations and presentation centrality on unhealthy food consumption (b=0.000, P=.03), suggesting that the effects of unhealthy food presentations rise with increasing levels of centrality. There was no interaction between unhealthy food presentations and presentation centrality on the consumption of healthy foods (b=0.000, P=.10). Also, exposure to healthy food presentations interacted with centrality (b=-0.001, P=.003). That is, when a healthy product is presented at maximum centrality, it leads to less unhealthy food consumption in children. Co-viewing did not interact with exposure to unhealthy foods when explaining unhealthy (b=0.003, P=.08) and healthy (b=-0.001, P=.70) food consumption.

Conclusions:

We conclude that simply placing more healthy foods is not sufficient to combat children’s unhealthy food preferences. Further regulations may be necessary with respect to representations of unhealthy foods in children’s media.