Half of the teenagers in a University of Ghana study said a sugary fizzy drink advert made the drink seem a healthy choice. Of 667 young people aged 10 to 19 in the Volta and Oti regions, 334 (50.1%) gave that answer.
The PhD thesis looked at how adolescents react to adverts for foods high in fat, sugar and salt. Each participant was shown two real video adverts. One was for a popular instant noodle brand.
The other was for a sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drink. Both adverts had been approved by the Food and Drugs Authority and aired on TV and YouTube in 2021 and 2022. Data were collected from August 2021 to March 2022.
After each advert, the teenagers rated it on eight measures. The drink advert was liked by 66.5% of them. Six in ten (61.3%) said it made the drink seem fun, and over half said it looked appealing (56.7%) or popular (56.2%).
The noodle advert drew similar reactions. Two in three (65.7%) said it made the product seem fun, and 57.0% said it made it look popular. Nearly half said it made the noodles seem a healthy choice.
Where young people lived mattered. Teenagers in urban areas had more than twice the odds of saying the noodle advert tempted them to try the product. Girls were more likely than boys to find the drink advert fun.
The wider thesis found that 61% of the adolescents lived with food insecurity. Only 43.2% had eaten fruit and 53% vegetables in the previous 24 hours.
There are limits. The study measured reactions to two adverts, not what the teenagers later bought or ate. It is a snapshot, so it cannot prove that adverts change diets.
Answers were self-reported. The author notes the results may not apply to young people in other regions. Some figures in one results table do not add up exactly, so this article uses the underlying counts.
The author concludes that unhealthy food and sugary drink marketing poses a real threat to young people's diets, especially in towns. He recommends restricting advertising of unhealthy foods and stepping up nutrition education.
Source: Norbert Ndaah Amuna, PhD thesis, University of Ghana, 2024. Full document: https://ugspace.ug.edu.gh/handle/123456789/44533