Transcript
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HEATHER MONTGOMERY
Hello. I'm Heather Montgomery. I'm here today with my colleague psychologist, Dr. Mimi Tatlow-Golden, who's going to be talking about the work she's done on children. And you've worked on children and food, I believe?
MIMI TATLOW-GOLDEN
I have. Yeah. Yeah. I also do some work around children, they're learning about food, and what do they absorb from the environment around them as it were in a broad sense. So one of the things I'm really interested in is children's learning about food from food marketing. So that will be the advertising that sort of saturates the world around us. And we call that their advertised diet. So obviously, there is what they eat, but there's also the world of visual representations that they're surrounded by as well. And children's advertised diet is really dominated by things that aren't very healthy to eat a lot. And there's a lot of evidence that suggests that that affects the choices that they make and the things that they and their parents feel is normal to eat. So I was interested in finding out working with little children, three to five-year-olds, and finding out at what age does their knowledge about food brands start to jump up and comparing that to their understanding of what's healthy to eat. And I found that their knowledge of food brands is at least a year ahead of their early understanding of this is healthy or that's unhealthy. So that suggests to us that the food companies are getting in there well before the impact of parenting and the family and saying this is what's good to eat will start to have an effect. And that's genuinely a concern.
HEATHER MONTGOMERY
And as is digital marketing to children, which is another of your interests.
MIMI TATLOW-GOLDEN
Yes. So that work that I did with preschoolers was focused quite a lot on their television viewing. And now, of course, digital media are becoming very powerful in children's lives. So I don't really take the position that a lot of adults and policymakers that I hear have heard quite a lot of people say, well, get them off Facebook or get them away from whatever social media or devices they're on. I don't think that's realistic. This is the world that we're living in. So it's really about understanding how do young people engage with those media and what kind of an effect might that be having on them. So early research that we're doing at the moment is discovering that unhealthy food is an important part of children's self-presentation in social media and also how they rate people their own age who they view in social media. So they're more likely to rate them positively if they are associated with unhealthy food ads than if they're associated with healthy food ads in their social media streams. So that suggests to us that there's something going on here in early adolescence where children's developing identity is really important, and they're growing their relationships with their peer group. And, at that time, they're using unhealthy food as a way of presenting themselves, as a way of assessing their peers, and, of course, obesity is such a concern globally actually now, even in countries where there's malnutrition as well. So we believe that that's something that policymakers really need to be attending to now.
HEATHER MONTGOMERY
Mimi, that was fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us today.