Is There Fruit In That? Children Are Misled By Television Food Advertisements

Fruit‐flavored food advertisements on television often contain verbal (e.g., words like fruit, fruity, juice) and visual (e.g., images, art) references to fruit despite a lack of real fruit in the product. This study determined how information in television food ads affected children's (4–7y; n=49; 65% male) perceptions of foods’ fruit content. Each child was shown the ads (n=16) in random order and, after each, asked, “Did they use fruit to make this?” The ad groupings were for 100% real fruit foods (n=8) and foods containing 0% real fruit with artificial fruit‐flavors as their only fruit “content” (n=8). Each ad grouping had 4 categories with 2 ads/category: neither fruit images nor verbal references, fruit images, verbal fruit references, and both fruit images and verbal references. All ads were for foods not distributed in the study area to control for familiarity. The presence of fruit images in ads led to the perception that the food contained real fruit, regardless of its true fruit content. The accuracy with which they could identify whether a food was made with fruit was significantly lower for ads of foods containing 0% fruit when the ad had a fruit‐related verbal (p=0.017), visual (p<0.0001), or both references (p<0.0001). Results suggest that children are deceived about foods’ real fruit content when ads for artificially fruit‐flavored foods containing 0% real fruit include fruit images. Grant Funding Source : NJ Agricultural Experiment Station