Enticing children to eat healthy food is a task in itself, requiring some ingenuity on the part of the parents. Well, food companies have been astute enough to cash in on this to popularize their food products. They have created online games called advergames to introduce children to their latest food products. These games which feature food, can seriously affect a child’s decision for choice of healthy or unhealthy food. This has prompted researchers to carry out a study, as to how widespread these advergames have become.
What the researchers say?
By conducting a two part study, researchers went into thorough assessment of the situation and were able to come up with plausible explanations. In the first part of the study, they assessed how many children visited advergames sites and how long they stayed, and tallied the number of children. The researchers started first with the companies, who are pledged to the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative for promoting healthy food in their advertisements, to gauge whether they are actually following this.The researchers were able to deduce that at least 1.2 million kids visited the advergames websites of these companies on a monthly basis.
In the second part of the study, the researchers used a more direct method as to the influence of the advergames. They conducted a study by recruiting children between the ages of 7 to 12, totaling about 152 children altogether and assigned them to play two games. This was timed with a break in between for snacks, provided by the snack bar which had selections of healthy and unhealthy foods. Researchers selected a variety of games wherein, two games featured healthy food, two unhealthy and two control games which had no food features at all.
Researchers were able to discern how the children reacted to the food selection in the snack bar after they had played their games. Those children who played healthy games and those who played unhealthy games both ate big amounts of junk food, but the ones who played healthy games consumed 50 percent more of the healthy food provided. About 56 percent more of unhealthy food was consumed by the children who played the unhealthy games. They also consumed about 16 percent more of unhealthy food than those who played only the control games.
By this deduction, researchers were able to define just how much the advergames had an effect upon the children and their eating habits. The food companies had obviously done their homework well, hitting out with tempting offers for their products and getting the kids to buy them for consumption.
What can be done?
When children are given some incentive through games, it is only natural that they will fall for the bait. The parents cannot forcefully stop the kids from visiting advergames websites or asking them to stop playing games. The only way to counter this is by taking measures which may not bring immediate solution but can slowly be build up. Parents can change the style and presentation of food displayed before the children, without having to forgo on the healthy composition of the food. These can be heightened by brightening the colors of the food which is served to the children. Colors are always attractive to children and they will respond better to the healthy diet, if they are served in a colorful way as the advertisements display.
There are other measures which parents can adopt to get their young ones to eat healthier food. Meanwhile, parents need to get more creative when it comes to food presentation, always keeping the nutritional values as top priority.