- Digital marketing on platforms like TikTok and Instagram exposes children to ads for ultra-processed foods (high in sugar, salt and fat), contributing to childhood obesity. Many kids don’t realize they’re being targeted.
- Studies show that exposure to junk food ads increases children’s desire for and consumption of unhealthy food, with influencer marketing having a particularly strong impact.
- High smartphone and social media usage among children worldwide (e.g., 95 percent of U.S. teens, 91 percent of Australian teens) ensures widespread exposure to unhealthy food marketing.
- Voluntary regulations fail to protect kids, as marketers use influencers, interactive content and pandemic-themed strategies to bypass restrictions. WHO calls for stricter government-led policies.
- Researchers advocate for stronger laws, better education to help kids recognize ads and international cooperation to curb harmful marketing practices targeting youth.
(Natural News)—Amid the ubiquity of digital devices, a new paper reveals that social media is playing a significant role in promoting unhealthy eating habits among children and adolescents, contributing to the global childhood obesity epidemic.
The study published in BMJ Global Health in February highlights how young people are being bombarded with digital marketing for ultra-processed foods high in sugar, salt and fat, often without realizing they are being targeted.
In recent years, the rise of social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram has transformed the way food companies market their products. Unlike traditional media, these platforms use sophisticated algorithms to track user behavior and deliver personalized content.
This means that children and teenagers are constantly exposed to ads for unhealthy food, often embedded within videos, polls, games or quizzes. The subtlety of these ads makes it difficult for young users to recognize that they are being marketed to. (Related: Obesity is a social thing: Study finds health habits are “contagious” and highly influenced by social groups.)
The review looked at 80 different reports involving nearly 20,000 children and teenagers. It found a strong link between exposure to food ads and increased consumption of unhealthy foods.
For instance, children who saw more junk food ads were more likely to eat those foods, want them and ask their parents to buy them – a phenomenon known as “pester behavior.” Another study showed that influencer marketing of junk food significantly increased immediate food intake among nine- to 11-year-olds, while healthy food promotions had no such effect.
The impact of social media marketing is not limited to one country. In the United States, more than 95 percent of adolescents have access to a smartphone, with over 35 percent reporting near-constant use of the top five social media platforms.
In the United Kingdom, nine in 10 children own a mobile phone by age 11. Nearly a quarter of children ages five to seven also have their own phones, with more than one-third on social media.
Meanwhile, in Australia, a 2023 survey found that 91 percent of teens ages 14 to 17 and 54 percent of children ages 10 to 13 own a mobile phone. One in seven children between six and nine years old. Incidentally, the Land Down Under approved a social media ban for those younger than 16 years old last November.
The role of influencers and interactive content
The study also revealed that food marketers are increasingly using influencers and interactive content to appeal to young audiences. In Canada, 72 percent of youth ages seven to 16 were exposed to food marketing within 10 minutes of using their favorite social media apps.
On the country’s most-used websites for children, more than 93 percent of food ads promoted items high in fat, sodium or sugar. The most frequently advertised categories included cakes, cookies and ice cream.
The Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has further influenced food marketing strategies. In New Zealand, 14 of the top 20 unhealthy food and drink brands posted COVID-themed content during the pandemic, using relevant themes to stay visible and influential.
Instagram marketing tactics tend to appeal to a younger audience. Meanwhile, Facebook advertisements often include interactive games and apps.
The World Health Organization has long warned that food marketing is a public health threat that negatively affects children’s food choices and dietary intake. In July 2023, the global health body released a new guideline recommending that countries implement comprehensive mandatory policies to protect children from the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages high in saturated fats, trans fats, free sugars and/or salt.
The study reinforces this warning, calling for urgent, government-led reforms to better protect youth online. It also underscores the urgent need for action to address the impact of social media on children’s eating habits.
The researchers conclude that unhealthy food regulations for children and adolescents have not kept up with the changing digital marketing landscape, particularly with the rise of social media. They argue that the same regulations and approaches that were employed for traditional media sources will not be effective across the digital world.
The study authors ultimately call for parents and guardians to advocate for government regulations to better protect children from ultra-processed and other unhealthy food marketing practices. “Children deserve to grow up in an environment that supports their health, not one that constantly encourages them to eat junk food,” said senior study author Dr. Cervantee Wild.
FightObesity.news has more similar stories. Watch Jefferey Jaxen and Del Bigtree discuss a new study showing that obesity impacts the immune system.
This video is from The Highwire with Del Bigtree on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- Coronavirus lockdowns worsen childhood obesity, studies say.
- Responsible TV and Internet advertising needed to reduce childhood obesity.
- Are we really making headway with childhood obesity?
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
