Fast Food Marketing Disproportionately Targets Kids In Black Neighborhoods: Study-gctid131633

[Ajamu]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fast-food-marketing-disproportionately-targets-kids-in-black-neighborhoods-study/ar-AA7OIpH

         Fast Food Marketing Disproportionately Targets Kids In Black Neighborhoods: Study

                                                                                                           The Huffington Post    
                                                        Kevin Short

Maximilian Stock Ltd. via Getty Images             This October 13, 2010 photo shows a McDonald's Happy Meal  complete with a 'Star Wars' toy. New York City artist, Sally Davies,  bought a Happy Meal six months ago on April 10, after observing and  photographing it...      Kids are a lucrative prize for the fast food industry: Studies have found that kids can form strong bonds with certain brands, and that those bonds can last for their entire lives.

A new study  from Arizona State University has found that fast food restaurants more  aggressively target certain kinds of children with marketing:  specifically children living in middle-income neighborhoods, rural  communities and majority black neighborhoods. The research will be  published in the December edition of the American Journal of Preventive  Medicine.

For the study, researchers from Arizona State  University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Barker Bi-Coastal  Health Consultants, Inc., analyzed 6,716 fast food restaurants around  the country. The researchers studied fast food chains with at least 20  restaurants, and did not distinguish between corporate-owned and  franchised outfits.

The study looked at interior marketing  tactics, like play areas and displays of meal toys, and exterior  strategies, like posters of cartoon and movie characters and images of  toys displayed outside the restaurants. The study did not analyze  advertisements for children in the media, including tactics like TV  commercials and digital ads.

The researchers found that one-fifth  of the fast food restaurants they studied utilized the in-store  child-directed marketing tactics they were looking for. And the stores  that did were more likely to be located in certain communities: Fast  food restaurants in predominantly black neighborhoods were about 67  percent more likely to use child-directed marketing than those in white  neighborhoods. Additionally, restaurants in rural areas were 40 percent  more likely to use these tactics than those in urban areas.

Fast  food restaurants in poor neighborhoods only used child-directed  marketing about 4 percent more than restaurants in high-income  neighborhoods, the researchers found. But middle-income neighborhoods,  defined as the 25th-75th percentile of median incomes, stuck out:  Restaurants in those areas were 28 to 34 percent more likely to use  interior and exterior marketing focused on children than restaurants in  upper-income neighborhoods.

Chain restaurants were more than 6  times more likely to use these strategies than independent restaurants,  the researchers found.

Fast food restaurants allocated roughly  $700 million to market towards children and teens in 2009, Punam  Ohri-Vachaspati, the lead researcher on the study and an associate  professor of nutrition at Arizona State University, said in a press release about the research.

"Marketing  food to children is of great concern not only because it affects their  current consumption patterns, but also because it may affect their taste  and preferences," Ohri-Vachaspati said. "We know that consumption of  fast food in children may lead to obesity or poorer health, and that low  income and minority children eat fast food more often."

While it  may seem counterintuitive that researchers found more child-focused  marketing in rural areas than in urban ones, Sriram Madhusoodanan, a  spokesperson for Corporate Accountability International, a nonprofit  consumer advocacy group, told The Huffington Post that the "lack of  access to fast food alternatives" in rural  and low-income areas drives  fast food companies to enter the communities and market more  intensively.
Madhusoodanan's group pushes for fast food companies to be  subject to tighter marketing and health standards.

Madhusoodanan drew a parallel between the tactics of fast food chains and tobacco companies.

"This  really the same cradle-to-grave marketing strategy that tobacco used:  Hook them early and hook them for life," said Madhusoodanan.

Over the last 30 years, childhood obesity  has doubled and adolescent obesity has quadrupled. Forty percent of  12-to-19-year-olds eat at a fast food restaurant on any given day,  according to a November 2012 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.