This post is written by Dr. Joe Thompson, the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity and the Surgeon General of Arkansas. 

Cereal and Saturday morning cartoons go together like peanut butter and jelly. The downside is what else our children are seeing when they turn on the television.

The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University on Monday released Cereal F.A.C.T.S. (Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score) earlier this week which reported on, and rated, how cereals are marketed, and specifically targeted, towards children.

According to the report’s executive summary, “The least healthy cereals are the ones most marketed to children, and overall, children are exposed to a vast amount of marketing for highly-sugared cereals, more than for any other category of packaged food.”

Their results found that seven of the 10 cereals with the poorest nutritional content are the same products most heavily advertised on television and the internet. One of the study’s key findings is that cereals marketed to children have 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber, and 60 percent more sodium. And although none of these cereals qualifies to be included in the USDA Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, they all are designated as “smart choices” by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. These foods may proclaim to be “better-for-you,” but in actuality they are contributing to children’s poor health and the obesity epidemic.

With marketing targeting our young people, it creates a near toxic media environment that overwhelms kids with advertising on children’s networks and websites like Nickelodeon, Disney, and the Cartoon Network–networks that now bring the advertising into our homes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..

However alarming the statistics in the study may be, they are also indications that environmental factors can be changed via policy change and governmental regulation.

In the long run, this kind of regulation is helpful for all of our children, especially those who are disproportionately impacted by overweight and obesity: children of color and children in low-income communities.

To read the full study visit Cereal Facts.org.