Doctors ask crackdown on ads aimed at children
Young are at risk, says pediatricians group
CHICAGO -- Inappropriate advertising contributes to many children's ills, from obesity to anorexia, drinking alcohol, and having sex too soon, and Congress should crack down on it, the American Academy of Pediatrics says.
The doctors' group has issued a new policy in response to what it calls a rising tide of advertising aimed at children. The policy appears in December's Pediatrics, scheduled for release today.
"Young people view more than 40,000 ads per year on television alone and increasingly are being exposed to advertising on the Internet, in magazines, and in schools," the policy says.
Advertising examples cited in the statement include television commercials for sugary breakfast cereals and high-calorie snacks shown during children's programs and ads for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs shown during televised sports games.
The statement is also critical of alcohol ads that feature cartoonish animal characters, fast-food ads on educational television networks that are shown in schools, magazine ads with stick-thin models, and toy and other product tie-ins between popular movie characters and fast-food restaurants.
These pervasive ads influence children to demand poor food choices and to think drinking is cool, sex is a recreational activity, and anorexia is fashionable, the academy says.
Interactive digital television, expected to arrive in a few years, will spread the problem, allowing children to click on-screen links to Web-based promotions, the new policy says.
In response, the academy says doctors should ask Congress and federal agencies to ban junk-food ads during shows geared to young children; limit commercial advertising to no more than six minutes per hour, a decrease of 50 percent; restrict alcohol ads to showing only the product, not cartoon characters or attractive young women; and prohibit interactive advertising to children on digital television.
The academy also says that television ads for erectile dysfunction drugs should be shown only after 10 p.m.
Jeff Becker of the Beer Institute, an industry group for breweries, said that parents have more influence than advertising on teenagers' decisions to drink. He also said that brewers work to ensure that beer ads appear in adult-oriented media.
