Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles

267 Pages·2011·1.98 MB·English

by  Stephen Kline (auth.)

Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles
Also by Stephen Kline
OUT OF THE GARDEN
DIGITAL PLAY (co-authoreddd)
SOCIAL COMMUNICATION IN ADVERTISING (co-authoredd)
RESEARCHING AUDIENCES (co-authoreddd)
Globesity, Food Marketing
and Family Lifestyles
Stephen Kline
Simon Fraser University, Canada
© Stephen Kline 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-53740-8
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First published 2011 by
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN 978-1-349-35920-2 ISBN 978-0-230-30474-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230304741
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and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kline, Stephen.
Globesity, food marketing, and family lifestyles / Stephen Kline.
p. cm.
Summary: “This book examines the public controversies surrounding lifestyle risks
in the consumer society. Comparing news coverage of the globesity pandemic
in Britain and the USA, it illustrates the way moral panic brought children’s food
marketing to the centre of the policy debates about consumer lifestyles”—
Provided by publisher.
1. Obesity—United States. 2. Obesity—Great Britain. 3. Lifestyles—
United States. 4. Lifestyles—Great Britain. 5. Food—United States—
Marketing. 6. Food—Great Britain—Marketing. I. Title.
RC628.K55 2011
362.196'398—dc22 2010034138
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xii
1 Introduction: Growing Up in the Risk Society 1
Part I Bad News: Lifestyle Risk Agenda Setting 23
2 Framing the Body Politic: Advocacy Science and Setting
the Risk Agenda 37
3 Putting the Pan in the Pandemic 58
Part II The Policy Nexus: Assessing Children’s Vulnerability
to the TV Diet 79
4 The TV Diet: Advertising as a Biased System of
Risk Communication 86
5 Risks of Exposure: The Influence of Food Advertising on
Children’s Consumption 115
6 The Disruptive Screen: Understanding the Multiple Lifestyle
Risks Associated with Heavy TV Viewing 134
Part III Beyond Blame: Unpacking Media-Saturated
Domesticity 153
7 Obesogenic Lifestyles in the Media-Saturated Household 158
8 Panicked Parenting: Managing Children’s Lifestyle Choices
in the Risk Society 171
9 Consumer Empowerment in the Media-Saturated Family 194
10 Conclusion 218
Notes 228
References 229
Index 248
v
List of Figures
PI.1 Coverage of diseases in the German press (2004–6) 30
PI.2 Societal causes as mean percentage of news reports in the US 32
PI.3 News coverage of obesity in theGuardian and the
New York Times 35
2.1 Increasing percentage of the US population that is obese
according to BMI standardization 39
2.2 Science advocacy and medicalization of weight gain 40
2.3 Risk factors related to weight status: Comparing normal,
overweight and obese US adults 41
2.4 Epidemiology and setting the risk agenda 43
2.5 Reporting on medical cures and health care spending 47
2.6 Increasing child obesity in the UK (1989–98) and US 49
2.7 The new tobacco: Children and their lifestyle risks associated
with TV 51
2.8 The fast food frame: Focusing stories on lifestyle risks associated
with children 54
2.9 The distribution of obesogenic lifestyles in US teen populations 56
3.1 The discursive politics of food marketing: Stories focusing on
court cases and advertising legislation 59
3.2 Moral panic: Focusing on lifestyle risks associated with
children’s obesity 60
4.1 Ad spending by food types in the US (top 200 advertisers) 87
4.2 Number of ads in sample by country expressed as percentage of
sample by day part and country 100
4.3 Food ads as a percentage of total advertising time in the US,
Canada and the UK 100
4.4 Detailed Comparison of the ‘bad five’ in the Canadian and US
samples 101
4.5 Food types as percentage of day part 102
4.6 Comparison of food types advertised in North America
and the UK 103
4.7 National comparison of percentage of core foods in child and
adult day parts 103
vi
List of Figures vii
4.8 Relative weight of ‘bad five’ food categories as percentage of
food advertising in each national day part 104
4.9 Nutritional qualities of foods advertised in North America and
the UK 105
4.10 Percentage of ‘bad five’ food ads which mention health
properties of food by day part 106
4.11 Percentage of all claims when ad mentions health by day parts 107
4.12 Child-targeting strategies by country and day part 108
4.13 Percentage of ads referencing energetic forms of
leisure by day part 110
4.14 Percentage of ads stressing lifestyle values by day part 111
6.1 The relationship between TV watching and obesity 135
6.2 TV viewing and soft drink consumption 135
6.3 Obesity and soft drink consumption 136
6.4 Assessing the risk of obesity at different levels of soft drink
consumption 137
6.5 Interactions between ethnicity, excessive TV viewing and
obesity 137
6.6 Model of factors that influence children’s food choice, habits
and health 141
6.7 Factors mitigating TV advertising’s influences on brand choice 141
6.8 Media literacy levels of British Columbian primary school
students and its relationship to food choice 146
6.9 Children’s perceptions of their relationship to advertising 147
6.10 Exposure to advertising and brand knowledge as contributors to
unhealthy discretionary food choices 151
8.1 Comparing parenting styles 179
8.2 The matrix of lifestyle risks management 184
8.3 Cluster analysis of the family values scale items 185
8.4 Parental concerns about their child’s television viewing habits 186
8.5 Parental strategies for controlling children’s media use 189
9.1 Parenting and taste for healthy snacks as protective factors in
snacking 201
9.2 Eating behaviours which are differentially related to media use 204
9.3 Liking and watching TV as risk factors in discretionary choice 204
9.4 Protective factors in the US teen population 209
viii List of Figures
9.5 Risky behaviours also related to heavy TV viewing 209
9.6 Risky behaviours also related to ethnicity and gender 211
9.7 Screenagers at risk: Interrelation of gender and media use in
teen obesity 212
9.8 Gender differences in activity levels as a protective factor
in the relationship between TV and obesity 212
9.9 Obesity as a psychological risk factor related to gender
(suicidal thoughts) 214
Acknowledgements
Systems thinking makes for a restless mind. In the process of writing this
book I found myself attempting to knit together some of the ravelled
threads woven through my interdisciplinary career as a researcher. It started
when as a graduate student I began to reflect upon the biases of TV news and
its relationship to democratic social change which is predicated on open
and transparent communication about the evils we confront. My compara-
tive studies of Canada, the US and Britain made me aware of the different
ways journalists commented on hazards, war and social movements that
threatened the moral order – ultimately shaping both public opinion and
the policy agenda. Later on, as an environmentalist, I became troubled
by the unnecessary havoc wrought on the natural world by ‘un-reflexive
modernity’. Like other greens, I have long dreamt of and worked towards
a socio-ecological awareness of the environment that could help change
capitalism’s destructive relationship with nature. I have also long believed
that the problems of distributional justice required better analysis of the
system of social relations which dynamized the mediated markets. To this
end I have studied marketing communication as the privileged discourse
that both intensifies and distorts the negotiations between producers and
consumers in the globalizing marketplace. Recognizing that children today
become citizens in the context of media-saturated households in which
they are addressed daily by marketers who target them, I have also been
interested in the impact of toy and food marketing directed at them. And
as a father, I have had to confront TV and its profound disturbance of the
family system. This led me also to reflect on the ways children negotiate
domestic consumerism caught between parents, schools and peers. In this
book I have attempted to weave together these four threads woven through
my career – the importance of democratic journalism, the changing public
debates about environmentalism, the problem of regulating the mediated
marketplace and the dynamics of consumer socialization – through a case
study of child obesity.
In retrospect this synthetic ambition may have been presumptuous. The
changing discourses on children’s consumer empowerment in the risk
society are at the same time scientifically sophisticated, contradictory and
illusive. What started as a simple investigation into fast food marketing and
children’s capacity to make healthy lifestyle choices quickly broadened into
a five-year long empirical inquiry into the multiple layers of social commu-
nication shaping domestic consumption in the risk society. Child obesity
turned out to be a very robust social system problematic because the ques-
tion of mitigation leads in different directions – to the food marketers that
ix