The recently released 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasize the importance of establishing healthy dietary patterns beginning in early childhood, a recognition that what children eat can shape their health for life. Yet in reality, many of their food choices are influenced more by marketing than by nutrition science.
According to recent CDC data, approximately 62% of the daily calories consumed by children and teens come from ultra-processed foods. These products – including sugary cereals, packaged snacks, snack cakes, and sweetened beverages – are energy-dense, hyper-palatable, and strategically marketed to young audiences across multiple platforms.
And the evidence is clear: this marketing isn’t benign. Research shows that food advertising can strongly influence children’s preferences, snack choices, and overall intake – especially of sugary, ultra-processed items that can harm their current and future health.
An Environment That Undermines Healthy Habits
While many parents do their best to encourage healthy eating early in life, their efforts are often undermined by today’s food environment. Children are regularly exposed to persuasive marketing long before they’re able to fully understand the importance of good nutrition or how their choices could affect their long-term health.
Television ads, social media platforms, in-app games, and grocery store displays frequently use child-targeted tactics, including cartoon mascots, colorful packaging, and licensed characters. These strategies don’t just capture attention; they shape children’s food preferences, increase requests for advertised products, and lead to higher intake of unhealthy foods – particularly when promoted through social media, advergames, and other highly engaging formats.
Such marketing efforts overwhelmingly promote foods high in sugar, refined grains, and industrial seed oils – items that are inexpensive to produce and highly profitable, yet low in nutritional value. The result is an environment that makes it more difficult for families to encourage healthy eating and more likely that children will develop strong preferences for sugary and ultra-processed foods.
Early Dietary Exposure, Long-Term Consequences
Exposure to high-sugar, ultra-processed foods can shape children’s taste preferences and alter their metabolic responses, increasing the risk of insulin resistance, excess weight gain, and fatty liver disease later in life.
Metabolic risk may begin even before birth. Research shows that maternal nutrition during pregnancy can influence metabolic imprinting, the process by which a child’s long-term risk for obesity and other chronic conditions is shaped by early-life exposures.
These early exposures are contributing to an alarming rise in chronic conditions among children Approximately 1 in 5 U.S. children and teens are now classified as obese. Globally, UNICEF reports that obesity has now overtaken underweight as the more common form of malnutrition among school-aged children – affecting 1 in 10 or 188 million, and placing them at risk for serious, life-threatening diseases. Type 2 diabetes, once rare in non-adults, is also rising among children, particularly in underserved populations.
Importantly, this isn’t just about calories. Highly processed foods can affect brain reward pathways, increase cravings, and disrupt natural hunger and fullness cues, contributing to long-term metabolic dysfunction.
A Call for Smarter Policy to Support Children’s Health
Protecting children from aggressive food marketing isn’t about taking away enjoyment. It’s about setting reasonable limits on how unhealthy foods are promoted to those who aren’t yet equipped to make informed decisions.
Other countries have already taken action. The U.S. now has an opportunity to follow suit, with evidence-based policies that prioritize children’s health and reflect what we know about long-term metabolic risk. Several approaches could make a meaningful difference:
- Limit marketing of ultra-processed foods to children by learning from international policy. In Chile, cartoon characters are banned from packaging for foods high in sugar, salt, or saturated fat, and ads for these products are restricted during children’s programming as part of a national effort to reduce childhood obesity and improve diet quality. Other countries have adopted similar strategies: Hungary and Sweden also restrict the use of cartoon characters in marketing, while Canada and Norway prohibit all commercial food marketing to children. Ireland and Portugal go further by banning unhealthy food ads across all media and requiring health messages alongside food marketing. Adopting comparable measures in the U.S. could help reduce the influence of unhealthy food marketing on young audiences.
- Set clear nutrition standards for child-targeted products. Establish consistent criteria for foods marketed to children, including limits on added sugars and refined carbohydrates.
- Promote real food through schools and public campaigns. Prioritize minimally processed foods in school meals and ensure that public health messaging supports age-appropriate, evidence-based nutrition. Include nutrition education programs or workshops that help children learn to recognize healthy foods and understand how food
- Encourage voluntary reformulation by food manufacturers. Provide incentives for companies to improve the nutritional quality of products marketed to children, including reducing added sugars and using whole-food ingredients where possible.
Aligning Marketing with Children’s Health
Children deserve a food environment that supports rather than undermines their lifelong health. As the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines highlight the importance of early-life nutrition, it’s time to consider how marketing practices align with that goal. By creating thoughtful, evidence-based policy guardrails, we can help ensure that the next generation grows up with better options, clearer messages, and a healthier foundation for life.
