If milk was a person, what kind of person would it be? This is one of the questions Dr. Charlene Elliott asked 12- to 14-year-olds for her study “Food As People: Teenagers’ perspectives on food personalities and implications for healthy eating,” recently published in Social Science & Medicine.
In her research, Elliott, the Canada Research Chair in Food Marketing, Policy & Children’s Health and professor of communication at UCalgary, examines how multinational companies market foods to children and youth, as well as the regulatory and policy implications of such marketing.
What is a food personality?
It’s where marketers deliberately try to associate specific personality traits with a brand. For example, Pepsi is considered to be youthful, whereas Dr. Pepper is seen as non-conforming. I was interested in connecting this concept of brand personality to “unbranded” foods and commodities — foods that don’t have big advertising budgets to create specific associations in consumers’ minds.
What did you hear from teens?
In focus groups, we got them to tell us about the personalities of various unbranded and commodity products. For example, if broccoli was a person at a party, what kind of person would it be? The teens saw broccoli as shy, a loner and boring. “It’s the kind of person who wants to be class president, but isn’t popular enough.” Milk was, “the guy who has, like, three friends.” Junk food was considered to be, “the life of the party, but not a real friend.” Meat divided the genders, with girls saying that meat was “a fat, bald, old man sitting at the bar,” while guys saw it as a “jock.”
This sounds like high school.
We know that teenagers consider status when it comes to making food choices ... it was fascinating to see how teenagers apply a social status to foods themselves. But, more importantly, this research revealed the social meaning of food for young people, and the unsettling fact that healthy foods like broccoli or eggs were seen as nerdy and loners. This matters because we don’t make food choices for nutritional reasons — eating is profoundly social and symbolic.
Can broccoli change its loser rep?
That’s an interesting question. There’s a real shift in food marketing to focus on the health benefits of products — even sugary cereals may proclaim that they’re an excellent source of vitamin D! But unprocessed foods cannot compete with the marketing budgets of Big Food, and I am not sure whether top-down marketing techniques to make broccoli “cool” would work. We need to know how teenagers came to this consensus about these foods in the first place.
Income and Education Impacts Food Allergy
Canadians with lower education report fewer allergies than those with higher education and new immigrants report fewer food allergies than those born in Canada, says a study led by Ann Clarke recently published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.
Food allergy was less common among adults without postsecondary education than those with postsecondary education: 6.4 per cent vs. 8.9 per cent.
Of new Canadians, 3.2 per cent said they had a food allergy versus 8.2 per cent of those born in Canada.
Clarke, a professor in UCalgary’s Cumming School of Medicine and the Arthritis Society Chair in Rheumatic Disease, says the differences may be due to several factors: genetics, environment, poor health care, or even lack of awareness of allergies.
Does a High-Fat, Sugar-Diet Make For Aching Knees?
Kelsey Collins, a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering, is looking into the effect of a high-fat, high-sugar diet on chronic inflammation and knee osteoarthritis (OA) in rats.
OA, one of the most common musculoskeletal problem in adults, happens when the cartilage lining our joints breaks down. Obesity worsens it.
In the study, 45 per cent of the rats’ calories come from sugar and 40 per cent from fat — a typical Western diet. A control group of rats gets only 13.5 per cent fat and no sugar. Thus far, the first group is showing worse OA.
Collins hopes her data will provide important information about the impact of diet on joint health and lead to better treatment for OA patients. “Osteoarthritis currently affects one in eight Canadians; by 2040, that will be one in four. That’s 30 per cent of the workforce,” she says. “The goal is to mitigate, stop or, ideally, prevent it altogether. U