New York Times Discusses Online Food Marketing, Sugar’s Side Effects

An April 21, 2011, New York Times article targets the online marketing techniques allegedly used by food companies “to build deep ties with young consumers,” claiming that “multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps” have become “part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers.” The Times highlights the efforts of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Childhood Obesity, which have backed strict regulation in lieu of the current voluntary measures. “Food marketers have tried to reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass parents so successfully,” said CCFC Director Susan Linn.

According to the article, the groups have called for rules similar to those
governing children’s TV that require “a buffer between ads and programs
so that children can tell the difference.” In particular, they have argued that
Internet-based marketing has eroded the traditional boundaries between
content advertising. As Rudd Center Director Kelly Brownell told the Times,
online games, puzzles and other multimedia presentations are supposedly
“more cost-effective than TV spots because they were cheaper to produce and
disseminate and were promoted by the children themselves” through word
of mouth or social sites like Facebook. “The kids are not only recipients of
marketing, they are the tools of marketing,” he was quoted as saying.

In a related development, the newspaper’s April 17, 2011, Sunday Magazine
section featured an article, titled “Is Sugar Toxic?,” that explores the research
of Robert Lustig, a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and childhood
obesity with the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.
Lustig evidently catapulted into public prominence after his lecture, “Sugar:
The Bitter Truth,” received more than 800,000 views on YouTube at a rate of
approximately 50,000 per month. “The viral success of his lecture, though, has
little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive
case he makes that sugar is a ‘toxin’ or a ‘poison,’ terms he uses together
more than 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five
references to sugar as merely ‘evil,’” reports Times writer Gary Taubes, noting
that Lustig has linked excessive sugar consumption not just to diabetes and
obesity, but “several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases
of Western lifestyles—heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers
among them.”

Taubes goes on to ask “the salient question: Can sugar be as bad as Lustig says it is?,” tracing the convoluted history of sugar research from the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup in the 1980s as a panacea for refined sugar, then considered “a generally noxious ingredient.” He adds that, according to conventional wisdom, “the worst that can be said about sugars of any kind is that they cause tooth decay and represent ‘empty calories’ that we eat in excess because they taste so good… Whether the empty-calories argument is true, it’s certainly convenient. It allows everyone to assign blame for obesity and, by extension, diabetes . . . to overeating of all foods, or underexercising, because a calorie is a calorie.”