Kids with wildly popular YouTube channels are frequently promoting unhealthy food and drinks ​​in their videos.

That's the warning from researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health and NYU Grossman School of Medicine in a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.

Food and beverage companies spend $1.8 billion dollars a year marketing their products to young people. Although television advertising is a major source of food marketing, companies have dramatically increased online advertising in response to consumers' growing social media use.

'Kids already see several thousand food commercials on television every year, and adding these YouTube videos on top of it may make it even more difficult for parents and children to maintain a healthy diet,' said Marie Bragg, assistant professor of public health nutrition at NYU School of Global Public Health and assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone. 'We need a digital media environment that supports healthy eating instead of discouraging it.'

YouTube is the second most visited website in the world and is a popular destination for kids seeking entertainment. More than 80 per cent of parents with a child younger than 12 years old allow their child to watch YouTube, and 35 per cent of parents report that their kid watches YouTube regularly.

'The allure of YouTube may be especially strong in 2020 as many parents are working remotely and have to juggle the challenging task of having young kids at home because of COVID-19,' said Bragg, the study's senior author.

When finding videos for young children to watch, millions of parents turn to videos of 'kid influencers', or children whose parents film them doing activities such as science experiments, playing with toys, or celebrating their birthdays.

The growing popularity of these YouTube videos have caught the attention of companies, who advertise or sponsor posts to promote their products before or during videos. In fact, the highest-paid YouTube influencer of the past two years was an eight-year-old who earned $26 million last year.

'Parents may not realise that kid influencers are often paid by food companies to promote unhealthy food and beverages in their videos. Our study is the first to quantify the extent to which junk food product placements appear in YouTube videos from kid influencers,' said Bragg.

The researchers found that nearly half of the most-popular videos from kid influencers (42.8 percent) promoted food and drinks. More than 90 percent of the products shown were unhealthy branded food, drinks, or fast food toys, with fast food as the most frequently featured junk food, followed by candy and soda. Only a few videos featured unhealthy unbranded items like hot dogs (4 percent), healthy unbranded items like fruit (3 percent), and healthy branded items like yogurt brands (2 percent).

The videos featuring junk food product placements were viewed more than 1 billion times – a staggering level of exposure for food and beverage companies.

'It was concerning to see that kid influencers are promoting a high volume of junk food in their YouTube videos, and that those videos are generating enormous amounts of screen time for these unhealthy products,' said Bragg.

'It's a perfect storm for encouraging poor nutrition--research shows that people trust influencers because they appear to be 'everyday people,' and when you see these kid influencers eating certain foods, it doesn't necessarily look like advertising. But it is advertising, and numerous studies have shown that children who see food ads consume more calories than children who see non-food ads, which is why the National Academy of Medicine and World Health Organization identify food marketing as a major driver of childhood obesity,' said Bragg.


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