Killing for Profit: The Junk Food Industry’s Shameful Targeting of Black and Latino Youth

Photo by Cory Doctorow.

By Anna Lappé
One hundred and six million people tuned in to watch the Broncos take on the Seahawks in this year’s Super Bowl; almost as many saw the McDonald’s ad that ran during the game, featuring a dunk contest between basketball stars LeBron James and Dwight Howard. Using athletes to sell burgers — especially to reach a young audience — is nothing new. Neither is using black celebrities to target young people of color. (The LeBron James ad was itself a tacit nod to a McDonald’s ad that pitted Michael Jordan against Larry Bird back in 1993.)

What’s different today is that marketing by the junk food industry directed at African-American and Latino youth has increased in scope, scale and savvy. Americans may be increasingly aware of the health consequences of consuming fast food and sugary drinks, but target marketing is on the rise — and it’s everywhere: Not just on television but in classrooms, in neighborhoods, on social media. It happens in obvious ways, through big-budget TV ads, and in subtle ways, through peers enlisted as brand ambassadors. Referring to young people of color, Lori Dorfman, director of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, explained to me, “Marketing is integrated in all aspects of their lives.”

This is particularly alarming because young African Americans and Latinos are also experiencing diet-related disease at higher rates than their white peers.

While obesity among all young people has more than quadrupled over the past four decades — from just 5 percent among 6-to-19-year-olds in the 1960s to 19.6 percent in 2008 — rates among African-American and Latino youth have outpaced those of white youth. The statistics are most alarming for African-American teenage girls: Among those ages 12 to 19, nearly 1 in 3 were obese in 2008, the highest prevalence by age, gender, race or ethnicity.


Diabetes among young people is way up, too. In less than a decade, we saw a 21 percent increase of Type 1 diabetes diagnoses among children up to age 19 and a 30 percent increase for Type 2 diabetes. But African-Americans are much more likely to develop diabetes than their white peers: A white boy born in the year 2000 has a 26.7 percent risk of being diagnosed with diabetes in his lifetime — quite high — but a black girl born the same year has nearly double that risk.

As Carol Hazen, director of advocacy resources for the Food Marketing Initiative at the Rudd Center, told me, “When you add together target marketing and the disparate rates of diet-related diseases, what you have is a social justice issue.”

Read More