REASONS AND NECESSITY TO HAVE CONTROL OF FOOD ADVERTISING IN CHILDREN TV PROGRAMS

Children are often deceived by advertisements! It is a well-established fact that diets are important to child development and growth. Wellness and quality of life of children and youth today has changed in a way that should be worried. That is, 97% of Thai children watch television more than other age groups do. The period that children watch TV is also the period they consume cracker snacks the most. Because children spend most of their time learning from media, they tend to follow western culture and be stimulated by advertisements they watch. This influences their eating behavior, belief attitude both in the long term and short term. From the monitoring and watching food and beverage advertising in children programs on free TV 2014, it is found that 94% of advertisements are advertisements for unhealthy food, not suitable for children's health. These advertisements employ techniques that persuade and invite children to consume the advertised products such as presenting celebrities, popular figures, cartoon characters, making the size of food larger than its usual size, emphasizing taste encouraging over-consumption and replacement of the advertised product to a meal, representing that the advertised product contain nutritious value, cheap, and the consumption will make the consumer looks superior to others who do not consume it. Moreover, some of them present sexually explicit content which is not suitable for young audience and indirect advertisement in every form.