all to call into our minds a child or children who we love. It can be a daughter, a son,

it can be a godchild, it can be a niece or nephew, a brother or sister. Just picture

in your mind's eye who that kid is and I will be picturing this one. Yeah, I think she's

kind of cute. That's my daughter Ida. That was on her 2nd birthday. One of her friends

gave her that tiara that she insisted on wearing for the whole rest of the party. So I'll be

thinking of Ida. And when Ida was 2, right around this age, she fell in love. Deeply,

madly in love. Her name was Dora. And Dora was pretty cool. She was adventurous, she

even spoke Spanish, she was pretty cool. She also sold band-aids. And if you're a parent

out there you might have had some experience with the Dora band-aid. But if you have you

would know what I mean when I say my child became obsessed with these band-aids. It was

the kind of obsession that had her faking injuries just so she could wear them. And

I got completely sucked in to supporting her habit. I'd like to tell you that that desperate

woman hunting down the Dora band-aids late at night at Rite-aid wasn't me. It was. Of

course, cute, charismatic cartoons like Dora aren't just selling band-aids. The food industry

has figured out how to use cartoon characters to get kids hooked on their products too.

So you may have seen Spongebob on pop-tarts or Shrek on Twinkies. Like this one here,

and it does say somewhere on there, ogre green creamy filling, same great taste. You may

have seen some of these packages, you may have seen Dora on cupcakes, crackers, popsicles,

ice cream. And it's not just cute cartoon characters that the food industry uses to

get kids hooked on their products. It's lots of other things that they're doing. In fact

the food industry itself says that they spend about $2 billion every year - $2 billion every

year - in marketing directly to children and teenagers. And of course the industry is spending

many billions more than that in marketing that kids are seeing anyway. And the way that

the food industry is now targeting young people, I have found, as I've kind of dug into what

they're doing, I found to be quite alarming. When you think about it in the context of

the fact that diet-related illnesses among young people are on the rise. We all know

that. And we think about this omnipresent marketing I think it isn't an exaggeration

to say that it has become downright dangerous. So the food industry knows that marketing

to kids works. What does it do for them? It builds brand loyalty which can sometimes last

a lifetime. So you target young people, you get them hooked on your brands early, that's

a lifetime of brand loyalty. It also generates what the industry calls 'pester power.' So

some of you out there, you might be parents, you might be familiar with what pester power

is. It doesn't feel too good but it works. 75% of parents say they have bought a product

for the first time because their child asked them for it. Or the speak in industry terms,

their child pestered them for it. The more I learned about the ways that children and

teens are being bombarded with food marketing, the more outraged I have become. And you might

be too as you learn what I'm about to share with you today. If a child watches a typical

amount of television every year, they will now be seeing 4,600 ads for food and drink.

Most of those ads will be for foods and drinks that are high in fat, sugar, and salt. so

4,600 ads every single year. And what we know about seeing those ads is we know it gets

kids to prefer certain brands. We also know it gets all of us to just eat more, period.

So you might think, well ok ,so the answer's simple. They're being bombarded on television,

so just turn off the TV. Just don't expose kids to TV. Well it's not that simple. You

see, junk food marketing to children and teens has now become nearly impossible to avoid.

Because so much of it is happening outside of a parent's control and beyond our reach.

So there are now, I was particularly shocked when I discovered this, there are now classroom

curricula sponsored by Oreo cookies. This is the Oreo cookie counting book. There are

also the M&M counting book. There is the 'spark creativity with fruit loops' activity book

for preschoolers. And the list goes on and on and on and on. You can now find corporate

logos on school gymnasiums, and community centers and school hallways and yearbooks.

They're even trying to get on school buses. There's also this kind of new wave of marketing

where you have junk food companies and fast food companies trying to partner with trusted

public institutions to help build that brand loyalty. So a few years back there was a partnership

between McDonald's and Big Macs and Unicef. And I just don't really think Big Mac and

Unicef should really be in the same sentence. So you're having that kind of marketing. And

you're also starting to see some marketing posed as charity. So you have initiatives

like Pepsi Refresh or My Coke Rewards, which is billed by Coca-Cola as this great fundraising

tool for schools. Some of you may have heard of My Coke Rewards - the concept is you buy

Coke products, you get reward points and then you can redeem them for a whole range of different

prizes, including those you can get for your school. So we looked into it a little bit

and we found that to get this physical activity pack, there's some whistles in there, some

jumpropes, some balls, do you know how many cans of Coke you need to buy to get enough

reward points for your school to earn this? 55,000 cans of Coca-Cola. 55,000 cans of Coca-Cola.

It doesn't really seem like such a deal to me. So what I have found actually particularly

upsetting about how the food industry is marketing to children and teens is that when you dig

into the research about it, what you find is that young people of color are bearing

the brunt of this marketing. African-American teens, for instance, are barraged with 80%

more ads for sugary drinks than white teenagers. And this is especially upsetting because African-American

children and teenagers are already among the hardest hit from diet-related illnesses. And

that inequality is made even worse by race-based target marketing. So what is the food industry

say about of this? They're saying, well, we're marketing to kids less, we're doing it less.

But the truth is that they're just changing where and how they're doing it. So they're

no dummies. They know where young people are these days. Probably all of us know where

young people are these days. Online. Right? 73% of teenagers are now on some social media

site. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. The food industry is on all of these platforms. And

what are they doing on them? They're pushing promotions, and prizes, and contests, and

coupons, all to get kids coming back often and sharing with their friends. There are

now dozens of websites out there designed for kids by food companies with free games,

and contests. There are sites like Ronald.com, which is McDonald's site just for preschoolers.

And on these sites what you find again and again and again is that you have to enter

to play these games and to get all these freebies and prizes, you have to enter your personal

information. So your birthday, your cell phone number, personal information that is then

used to sell to you more. So if you're a teenager today and you're walking by a McDonald's you

might just get a text message promotion for a Big Mac because they have your cell phone

number and your GPS information. I was telling a friend about this, I was telling a friend

who works for the New York City Dept of Public Health. And I was telling her about just this

level of data that is now being collected on young people and that's being used to figure

out how to market to kids. And she said, Anna, can you imagine if we had those resources

to do that kind of specific marketing? She said, can you imagine how incredible our marketing

campaigns could be for health food? She said we could send text promotions for farmers

markets. But the Public Health Dept. doesn't have that level of resources or that level

of data. The food industry does. And what I find so disturbing about the power that

the junk food industry now holds to reach our kids, to reach young people today, is

that what children and teenagers are enticed to consume has life and death consequences.

And when I say life and death, I am not exaggerating. Life and death consequences. In the past 30

years the prevalence of obesity among children and teens has tripled. Today, a child born

in this country has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes at some point in their lifetime.

For African-American and Latino kids that is a 1 in 2 chance. 1 in 2. It's not just

diabetes, it's also heart disease and high blood pressure, asthma, even certain cancers.

It's diet-related illnesses that are having many doctors see conditions in their practice

that they have never seen before. Like the pediatrician I met in Maine who was telling

me that young people in their 20's are coming in to get dentures because they have been

drinking soda their entire lives. In their 20's. It has people like the pediatrician

I met from Chicago who was telling me that he now has to fit young people with leg braces

because their growing bones and joints can no longer support their weight. It's tragic,

and it's so tragic because this is all totally preventable. It doesn't have to be this way.

And you don't have to be a parent to have your heart break hearing these stories, right?

We all have children in our lives who we love, and we're all paying the price for this crisis

in mounting healthcare costs. But I am not just here to tell you how bad things are.

I'm not just here to tell you how upset as a parent I am. I'm also here to talk about

what we can do about it. And here is where there is some incredible good news because

all over the country there are people putting pressure on policy makers and on companies

to protect kids from these dangerous marketing tactics. I'm here to tell you about the state

of Maine that was the first to pass a statewide ban on marketing junk food in schools. I'm

here to tell you about the people of Los Angeles who finally said enough and put a moratorium

on opening new fast food franchises in certain neighborhoods. I'm here to tell you about

the campaign for commercial-free childhood, which stopped McDonald's from advertising

on report card envelopes that would have promised elementary school students free happy meals

for good school performance. I'm here to tell you that all over the country people are passing

policies and winning lawsuits changing school norms all to protect our kids and promote

health eating. And the good news is this works. We know that when you teach kids about why

food matters, give them access to it, that they go for it. And I'm seeing proof of that

everywhere I go. Like the teenager I met who before working on this urban farm program

said the only vegetable she'd ever eaten were those that came between two hamburger buns.

And told me that now, thanks to working on this farm, she'd become a salad fanatic. So

we can raise healthy kids who love food that's good for their bodies. We can but not in this

food environment. What we're talking about doing is huge. We're talking about changing

social norms. But we've done it before and we can do it again. And we can do it by standing

up stronger, standing up taller, speaking up louder, joining with campaigns that are

happening across the country like those from Corporate Accountability International with

their campaign to suggest it might be time for Ronald to retire down to Florida. The

Campaign for Commercial-free Childhood which has successfully stopped logos going on school

buses everywhere they have tried to do that. Groups like the Center for Science in the

Public Interest and my group, the Food Mythbusters. Food companies say that it's up to parents

to raise health kids. That's what they say. And I agree. Absolutely. That's why I say

to those corporations, then leave parenting to us. Right? Don't tell children what's good

to put into their bodies. I have 2 daughters now. That's Ida and her baby sister Rosa.

And to the junk food industry I say this. My children - all of our children - are none

of your business.