Appetite for destruction: Food advertisements and your child

Pay attention to your child’s advertised diet — to all the foods they see advertised — and realise how unhealthy it is.

This is the recommendation from child psychologist Dr Mimi Tatlow-Golden, who led groundbreaking new research for the Irish Heart Foundation into hidden tactics used by junk food brands to target children online.

“Even with regulation, children are seeing more than 1,000 ads for unhealthy food on TV every year. Add to that unregulated digital advertising and they’ve got an overall very unhealthy advertised diet,” says Tatlow-Golden.