Abstract
Keywords
1. Introduction
2. Materials and methods
3. Results
4. Discussion
Ethical statement
Funding
Authors’ contributions
Declaration of competing interest
Acknowledgements
Appendix A. Supplementary data
References
Abstract
Traditional food marketing stimulates adolescents' consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. These dietary behaviours may track into adulthood and lead to weight gain, obesity and related non-communicable diseases. While social media use in adolescents has proliferated, little is known about the content of food marketing within these platforms, and how this impacts adolescents' dietary behaviours. This paper aimed to obtain expert insights on factors involved in the association between social media food marketing (SMFM) and adolescent dietary behaviours, and to explore their views on key priorities, challenges and strategies for future SMFM research and policies. One-on-one semi-structured interviews (n = 17) were conducted with experts from Western Europe, Australia and North America, in the fields of public health (policy), nutrition science, social media marketing, adolescent medicine, clinical psychology, behavioural sciences, communication, food industry, social influencing, and social marketing. The experts' collective responses identified that the line between food content posted by social media users and food companies is blurred. Adolescents' processing of SMFM may be mostly implicit, involving social comparison, emotional engagement, and attaching symbolic meanings to foods. Mediating factors and adolescent-specific and SMFM-specific moderating factors potentially influencing adolescents' response to SMFM were summarized in a Social Ecological model.
1. Introduction
Despite several calls for action in the past three decades, adolescents have largely been overlooked in global health and social policy, which has urged academics from a range of disciplines worldwide to develop strategies to advance adolescent health (Patton et al., 2014, 2016). The WHO indicated that globally more than one in six adolescents, i.e. individuals aged 10–19 years, was overweight in 2016 (World Health Organisation, 2018). The prevalence of overweight and obesity in younger children seems to have stabilised over time, while the prevalence of overweight and obesity in adolescents aged between 11 and 19 years has increased with 10–11% between 1988-1994 and 2013–2014 (Ogden et al., 2016; van Jaarsveld & Gulliford, 2015). Compared to younger children, adolescents are less likely to consume a diet that aligns with dietary recommendations despite nutrient needs being the highest during this life stage (Tucunduva Philippi et al., 2016; World Health Organisation, 2005). Adolescents’ dietary patterns are generally characterized by frequent snacking, fast-food consumption, and meal skipping (Vaitkeviciute et al., 2015). Unhealthy dietary behaviours established in adolescence can track into adulthood and increase risk of obesity and related non-communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease (Kaikkonen et al., 2013; Patton et al., 2011; Singh et al., 2008; Vaitkeviciute et al., 2015). One major factor influencing dietary behaviours is food marketing (Smith et al., 2019).