Food Advertising To Children Essay

It seems that everywhere we turn there is some sort of advertisement for food: on billboards, in magazines, and on the televisions that adults and young children watch daily. Food companies have integrated their products into television entertainment and commercials, opening up a now expansive industry, but not without controversy trailing close behind. One major contention revolves around food advertisements on television targeted towards children. Closely related is the epidemic of childhood obesity that looks us right in the eye her in the United States. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), among youth ages two through nineteen, nearly one in six of them are overweight and/or obese. With such unnerving numbers, countless studies and reports have been done to analyze the relationship that food marketing has on children and the historically rising obesity rate. Now, the next …show more content…
According to the First Amendment, the government “technically” cannot abridge the freedom of speech. Pomeraz and Adler discuss the increased protection that the government puts on “commercial speech”, yet it cannot be protected if the information it is promoting is “false, misleading, or relating to illegal activity” (40). To some, targeting food advertisements to children falls into at least one of these categories. The subject becomes touchy when we have to weigh the implied rights of the advertiser versus the health and safety of the public. In our society it appears as though the advertisers rights weigh supreme over the ethics of health. However, as some individuals including Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert argue in the article Advertising Overload, “Commercial speech shouldn’t be protected under the First Amendment, because corporations aren’t people.” The corporations are businesses that run off of money, so perhaps the way they are accommodated should be