A study which placed cameras on children found they were exposed to unhealthy food, alcohol, and gambling marketing more than 70 times every day.
Researchers from the University of Otago, in New Zealand, tracked 12-year-olds wearing the cameras over a four-day period.
Study co-author Professor Louise Signal said this allowed researchers to capture exactly what children saw in their daily lives.
Professor Signal said they found children were exposed to, on average, 76 unhealthy messages each day, nearly 250 percent more than healthy messages.
She said junk food was the most common at 68 exposures per day, with Coca-Cola emerging as the most common brand overall, appearing over six times each day.
“Beer brands dominated the alcohol advertising seen by children, and almost all of the gambling marketing recorded came from government-owned entities, such as Lotto and TAB.”
Professor Signal said the impact of the exposure was significant, contributing to problems such as obesity, cancer, addiction, and debt, and costing billions of dollars in healthcare and lost productivity.
“The saturation of harmful marketing undermines the values parents work hard to teach at home, replacing family guidance with the influence of multinational corporations.”
Study co-author Associate Professor Leah Watkins said it was the first time anywhere in the world that adults had been able to see, in real time, how pervasive this kind of marketing was for children.
“Young people cannot fully understand the persuasive intent of advertising until around the age of sixteen, leaving them especially vulnerable to corporate tactics designed to win their loyalty early,” Associate Professor Watkins said.
She said they study found that children from disadvantaged neighbourhoods were subjected to far more unhealthy marketing, due to the amount of junk food marketing they saw.
Read the full study: Public health and harmful advertising: The nature and extent of children’s real-time exposure to unhealthy commodity marketing.