TORONTO - Youngsters say they like the taste of a breakfast cereal more when there's a popular character on the box, a small study indicates.
But if there are no characters on the box, they state a preference for a cereal labelled "Healthy Bits" over the same cereal called "Sugar Bits."
Foods aimed at children have used friendly characters for years -- either trade characters such as Tony the Tiger on the Kellogg's Frosted Flakes box, or licensed characters like those seen in kids' television shows or films, observed researcher Sarah Vaala of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
"Both are used to help young children identify and remember the product, kind of a visual cue, and they often have a favourable attitude toward that character, and they tend to transfer that positive feeling to the product," said Vaala, of the Annenberg School for Communication.
This has been known for a long time, she said, but her group wanted to find out if the favourable feeling transfers to the youngsters' judgment of the actual taste of the food product.
Eighty children between the ages of four and six at a shopping centre in a large northeastern U.S. city took part in the study, published in the March issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Each child was seated behind a partition with the investigator so the parent or guardian would not influence the responses.
Vaala said the kids sampled the same cereal from one of four boxes -- labelled either "Healthy Bits" or "Sugar Bits," and with or without penguins from the movie "Happy Feet" shown on the box.
The product was an organic crunch cereal with six grams of sugar per serving that was likely to be unfamiliar to the children by sight and taste.
"They all tasted the same cereal, and the results showed that when there was no character on the box, children who saw the 'healthy' cereal box liked the taste more than children who saw the sugary cereal box with no character," Vaala said.
"So we thought this is a positive, favourable finding that these health cues, these messages for kids to eat healthy foods, seems to be resonating ... However, when there was a character on the box, these health cues didn't matter. Children liked the cereal a lot, regardless of whether the cereal sounded healthy or unhealthy."
Vaala said it's disconcerting that the presence of a friendly character on the packaging is enough to override the judgment of the health benefits of the cereal.
Natalie Brown, a nutrition consultant in South Surrey, B.C., said it's not surprising because kids are vulnerable to relating to something that's familiar to them.
"So for them to see familiar characters and whatnot on either a box of cereal or whatever the case may be, it just to them is just a lot more appealing, because it's something they can see on TV, it's something they can play with, or they can relate to."
Many products targeted at children have higher sugar, salt and fat content than adult varieties of the same thing, she noted.
Parents should aim to get higher fibre content cereals because a lot of sugary cereals have low fibre, she advised.
"It's hard, because the kids see these fun labels and things like that and, of course, then they nag the parents ... to get that product, and you know, I have to say, most parents give in to at least getting some of these things."
Rena Mendelson, a professor of nutrition at Ryerson University in Toronto, said it's a "fascinating" study because it didn't make use of cereals and packaging that's already familiar to kids.
The outcome is not a surprise, she said.
"This is something the food industry probably knows. They've been doing it for a long time, and so they have loads of really interesting data that are obviously proprietary data that we can never have access to, but they have probably a very good understanding of what makes things sell."
As for the preference for the cereal labelled "Healthy Bits" when no characters are used, she said it could mean the message of healthy eating is getting through to kids.
"I think kids even at a young age are getting messages from their parents that healthy is good and sugar is bad," she said. "They're not seeing it as healthy tastes bad and sugar tastes sweet."
But at the end of the day, she wonders if parents are consistent.
"Because from what we've seen in some of the research, kids sometimes get mixed messages, so they hear, 'This is healthy, eat it, and then you'll get rewarded with something sweet.' So they develop these associations of sweet with reward."
