Cartoon Characters Won’t Curb Obesity
A new website, funded by the Department for Health, aimed at 4-7 year olds, and:
“strives to encourage healthy eating and an active lifestyle in a fun and informative way. We hope that by visiting our interactive site, children will become familiar with healthy living messages and develop positive habits that will follow them through to adulthood.”
Named “The Great Grub Club” (with the really unimaginative tagline “Being healthy is fun!”) it appears to be working on the premise that children react well to cartoon characters, and so by making cartoon characters who are health conscious they can make kids want to be more healthy and eat more fruit and veg. With names such as Snack the Dog and Professor Foodsmart, the cartoon characters encourage children to cook and even grow vegetables. And, of course, a website aimed at making children healthy would be complete without a section on exercise.
Do they really, seriously, think that a bunch of cartoon characters are going to make children want to eat healthy? I mean, come on! Children don’t tend to react well to that sort of blatant pro-healthy stuff, especially when the characters are only known through one website! It is simply a waste of money to use only a website to get this message across. It needs to be in the form of a TV programme really, or else kids just won’t take anything away from it. An example of this is the success LazyTown had in Iceland.
It is, of course, a good thing to be pushing for children to eat healthily, but it’s not children who are deciding what they eat. Also, children - and adults - like junk food because it tastes good. Children, certainly, don’t have enough awareness to be able to equate that with any badness. Children won’t switch to wanting fruit and vegetables rather than burgers, pizza, or chips, and certainly not on the basis of a rather garish website and accompanying cartoon characters.
Source: BBC
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