Erin Reeve

Evolving Prior Breakfast Campaigns to Reduce the Childhood Obesity Rate

Many studies suggest that eating breakfast promotes weight control and weight

maintenance. In the midst of America’s obesity epidemic, many health communication

campaigns promote breakfast in an effort to reduce the childhood obesity rate in the United

States. Concurrent with prior campaigns that encourage children to eat breakfast were

advertisements and campaigns for new menu items from the fast food industry. Since 2005,

breakfast expenditures from fast food restaurants have risen 10 percent and are responsible for 66

percent of the industry’s total profits. It appears that although children were eating breakfast,

they were not considering the nutritional value of their choices.

Many prior campaigns that encourage children to eat breakfast failed to emphasize the

importance of the meal’s nutritional content. Studies conducted by the Center for Science in the

Public Interest state that the meal’s nutritional content is just as important as making the decision

to eat breakfast. Although the debate of which is more important is controversial, the general

public sees the link from fast food to obesity as common knowledge. Therefore, it is important to

evolve prior campaigns that encourage children to eat breakfast into campaigns that emphasize

the importance of the meal’s nutritional content. Eating an unhealthy breakfast and skipping

breakfast can have similar effects .Although people who eat breakfast on a regular basis are

healthier than those who normally skip, experts remind us that our obesity epidemic began when

convenience foods became prevalent. From the middle to late 1970’s, Burger King and

McDonalds began serving breakfast in America. Soon after, convenience foods became highly

demanded. Since this time, America’s childhood obesity rate has doubled. Regardless, the

market for fast food breakfast continues to grow. In 2010, Subway opened 23,000 stores

nationwide.

Furthermore, many fast food advertisements and campaigns helped create a discrepancy

between prior health communication campaigns. Many people began that by just eating

breakfast, they were being healthy. Convenience food companies and fast food restaurants used

persuasive messages in their advertisements and campaigns that furthered this belief. In 2009,

McDonalds produced a commercial in which a father and son ate McDonalds’ breakfast

sandwiches before the son hits a homerun. In 2008, McDonalds produced a commercial in which

different Olympic athletes explained why it was necessary to wake up early to train and eat their

McDonalds breakfast. They used statements such as, “Before it’s too late” to promote the

convenience of the sandwich. These commercials emphasized the convenience of McDonalds

foods, while suggesting that eating their breakfast would lead to enhanced athletic performance.

Despite this unrealistic outcome, Finance Daily reports that fast food sandwich sales have risen

30 percent since 2005. This indicates that the American public was persuaded and misled by

these commercials.

In 2001, when the “Eat Breakfast: a Behavior Change Campaign” was created, cereal

brands spent $792 million on advertising their cereals. Since then, breakfast cereal brands have

created their own campaigns, such as General Mill’s Choose Your Breakfast (2005), Quaker

Oatmeal’s Amazing Mornings (2006), Kellog’s Share Your Breakfast (2011). In alignment with

the “Eat Breakfast” campaign, these campaigns highlighted the benefits of eating breakfast and

how not eating breakfast could affect your health. These cereal brands saw an opportunity with

the “Eat Breakfast” campaign to promote their product. Otherwise, they may have risked being

seen as “unhealthy”.

Our Campaign

Due to a lack of time in the morning, parents and children whom eat breakfast may be

tempted to eat unhealthily due to these companies’ messages about convenience and health.

Although skipping breakfast may lead to weight gain and decreased academic performance,

eating an unhealthy breakfast that is high in sugar and simple carbohydrates may cause the same

effects. The USDA states, “by eating poorly at breakfast, they set themselves up to eat poorly

throughout the day.” Therefore, instead of focusing on solely eating breakfast, our campaign will

focus on the nutritional contents of a child’s breakfast in order to decrease childhood obesity in

the United States. Our main objective is to reduce the childhood obesity rate in America on a

local scale in hopes that it can become national with time and funds.

Children are incapable of eating a healthy breakfast for many reasons, but our campaign

will focus on time, education and economic issues, the two that we deemed most prevalent in

America right now. In a study conducted by the USDA, 27 percent of Americans eat their meals

and snacks outside of their homes. Secondly, a child and parents’ lack of knowledge may prevent

a child from eating a healthy breakfast. Thirdly, as stated above, past campaigns about simply

eating breakfast may cause confusion as to what is healthy. Furthermore, advertisements for fast

and convenience foods may cause people to believe that their food is nutritious. These faulty

advertisements can cause children and parents to make unhealthy decisions, despite their attempt

to be healthy.

Target Audience

To encourage children to eat a healthy breakfast on a local scale, our campaign’s team

will focus on students and parents at SPEAs elementary to demonstrate how to make quick, tasty

and healthy breakfasts. North Carolina has the 11th highest obesity rate in the nation. Thirty-two

percent of children in North Carolina have a BMI range of 25-29.9. Our target audience is

students at a local, low-income school, Speas Elementary. Speas is a Title One school, which is

a program that helps low-income students have the same opportunities as other students.

According to the DPI, 87 percent of the Speas Elementary students are from low-income

households. We believe that Speas would be a good school to target because “children from

low-income households do not generally eat as well as those from high-income situations.”

(USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion) To learn more about the intended audience,

we will distribute questionnaires to all the children when the students are in their “home room”

classrooms. This will eliminate children taking the survey more than once. The questionnaire

will ask if they eat breakfast and what they eat for breakfast to give us a generalization of their

breakfast habits.

Localization

The component of localization is unique in our campaign. In America, most campaigns

that promote eating breakfast have a national focus, which disallows the target audience to feel

responsible for their actions. Large-scale campaigns make it easier for individuals to ignore

because they do not feel that the campaign is directly targeted at them. Often times, large-scale

campaigns can, also, make the campaign’s target audience believe that their behavior is normal.

These campaigns, therefore, may render behavior change, rather than promote it. Therefore, by

localizing the campaign, we can make individuals feel more responsible for their actions, as they

begin to realize that they are part of the problem. A local-scale campaign will make children

want to eat healthier out of the fear of disappointing an authoritative figure, such as a teacher,

their parents, or a campaign leader. The campaign leaders will take surveys and ask students

about their breakfast habits at the weekly educational session to heighten this effect.

Implementing the program on a local-scale gives the campaign team an opportunity to be more

engaged with the students. Our campaign wants to give a similar feel to that of those people who

keep food diaries for dieticians. People are more likely to make healthier decisions because they

want to impress the dietician and because the problem is highlighted causing them to feel more

responsible for their actions.

Let’s Move Campaign

Our campaign will focus on helping children in low-income areas to eat a healthy

breakfast. We will follow the steps from Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” Campaign, which

suggests that childhood obesity is the fault of the parents, schools, government and the child.

Her campaign targets parents by suggesting healthy options and recipes for them to eat at home.

She targets the school by helping them create better tasting and healthier lunches. The

government is targeted by adapting her campaign to those in food desserts. She educates

children, as well, so that they are able to make healthy choices on their own. Similar to the

“Let’s Move” campaign, we believe that the high obesity rate amongst children is a collective

due to the decisions that the schools, government, parents and child make.

1. Lack of Education and Time

In Great Britian, similar to the United States in both size and culture, “A Better

Breakfast” campaign was launched to promote healthy breakfast eating in eleven local schools.

The campaign focused on educating the children on ways to eat a healthier breakfast and

overcome the issue of time. This campaign encourages children to make breakfast the most

important meal of their day, in hopes that eating breakfast will promote calorie control and eating

properly throughout the day. Instead of focusing on simply eating breakfast, it encourages

children to examine what they eat and why. The campaign holds cooking demonstrations to help

teach and show how children and parents can cook and eat a healthier breakfast when time is

scarce.

We will use the framework of this campaign in our campaign to help end issues of time and

education. To educate children, we will hold weekly seminars before school that will highlight

how to eat a healthy breakfast. We will use OrganWise Guys puppets to demonstrate how

different nutrients effect different organs. The program will use the OrganWise guys as healthy

“cool” icons to help gain the students’ trust and interest and change their perception that healthy

eating is associated with being uncool. We believe that for a child to be healthy, he or she must

make a conscious decision to be healthy and also have parents that are willing to provide healthy

options for their children. Since children have to make the conscious decision to be healthy, we

have to change the perception of what “being healthy” means to a child. Since children are more

likely to think a stuffed icon is “cooler” than a teacher, who is usually symbolic of an

authoritative, uncool figure, we will use the OrganWise Guys as icons to hopefully gain

children’s trust and interest to change their perception about what “being healthy” means to our

target audience. These messages will, also, be able to grasp the attention of the audience and be

interesting enough for them to remember and use what they have learned at meal time. We will

explain why it is important to eat these different nutrients and how to obtain them. We will, also,

focus on ending the discrepancy between what breakfast foods are and are not healthy. After

each session, we will put up a poster that explains the lessons learned from that day. Every time a

child enters the gym, he or she will be reminded of that lesson and hopefully implement it into

their breakfast routine.

To educate parents, we will have different recipes and informational blurbs in the

school’s weekly newsletter that will make it easier for them to understand and overcome the

issue of time when preparing a healthy breakfast for their children. We will suggest that all

aspects of health are interconnected and that a child who eats a nutritious breakfast is less likely

to acquire other health problems, such as Type 2 Diabetes, which can be costly for the parents.

Since Speas is in a low-income district, it is our hope that this will encourage parents to make

sure that their children are eating a healthy breakfast to keep medical costs of the future down.

We will also write a weekly post in the school’s newsletter about easy recipes and ways to get

children to eat a healthy breakfast.

As suggested by the “Let’s Move” Campaign, schools and the government, also, play a

role in the childhood obesity epidemic. We do not believe that teachers should be responsible for

their students’ meals. Instead, we will implement vending machines that the school and

government will have to pay for. Vending machines will be stocked with healthy breakfast

options like bananas, granola bars, trail mixes, low-fat milk, and mini boxes of cereal. This

would help those that may not have access to healthy food options or do not have time to grab

breakfast before arriving at school. For those that do not have the funds for a healthy breakfast,

we would like the school to provide newer, healthier options that would be provided as free

breakfast options for students with vouchers. Furthermore, for those on reduced lunches and

breakfasts, it is our hope that we can persuade the government to make healthier and better

tasting breakfast options using the information that was included in the beginning of this paper.

Media Channels

Besides our poster messages, we will also have recipe ideas in the parent newsletters for

our sub-audience, whom play a crucial role in our goal. These recipe ideas will make it easier

for parents, who otherwise may choose convenient foods for their children due to a lack of time,

energy, or desire. We understand that it is hard for parents to provide healthy options for

children, especially in the morning, when there is a huge time crunch. Our recipes, which will

all take 5 to 10 minutes each, will hopefully help parents make healthy decisions quickly and

easily for their children without having to map out nutrients and/or search for quick and healthy

options.

Since children are responsible for a large part of their diet, it is important that we make it

easy for a child to make healthy decisions. Posters will be hung so the children will be able to

recall and remember what was discussed in the lecturers. They will be able to see the posters

when they go to gym class every other day. The posters will, also, be placed by the vending

machines so that after the lectures, the students will be more tempted to make healthier breakfast

choices.

These messages relate to the theoretical basis of our campaign because we first want to

educate our audience and make them realize the difference between a healthy breakfast and just

eating breakfast. We understand that we are competing with past advertisements and campaigns

that have given the public the misconception that simply eating breakfast is healthy. However,

want to make it easy for our audience to learn how to and remember how to eat a healthy

breakfast easily.

Evaluation

We will evaluate our campaign by examining the children in pretests, posttests,

questionnaires, and mini-quizzes. We will evaluate these by taking the answers and comparing

them by looking in a before-and-after fashion. For the educational lecturers, it may be hard to

decipher if our lecture was a direct cause of the children’s learning or inability to learn the

material. We will have to decipher if the questions we asked were easier or if the material was

more interesting than the previous week. Also we have to look at if the teaching strategy we

used in the lecture was more effective. We will change and adapt our teaching strategies based

on the children’s scores on the mini-quizzes.

Our pre-test will test the student and parents’ perceptions of self-efficacy and food

availability. We will ask the following questions: 1. Do you eat a healthy breakfast? 2. How

often is healthy food available to you in your home? 3. Do you have enough time before school

to eat a healthy breakfast? 4. Do you think you would eat a healthy breakfast if it were available

to you?” Our answer scale would consist of the following options: 1-All the Time 2-Most of the

Time 3-I don’t know 4-Not Usually 5-Never. This will test for how many times a child eats

breakfast and how often it is healthy. It will also tell us factors that may make it hard to eat

breakfast, such as food unavailability and lack of time. Our post-test will help us test if our

campaign worked to create a behavioral change amongst the parents and students at Speas

Elementary and will consist of the same questions that were listed above.

As stated above, we will look at before-and-after results of the campaign with pre-and

post-tests. We will have to check the stock of the vending machines to see if this is an effective

and useful tool in our campaign. The vending machines should be located right outside of the

gymnasium, where the lectures will be held, to make it easier for kids to associate breakfast with

the lecture and remember where they are located. It will also make it easier for them to attain a

healthy breakfast right after the lecture.

To test the effectiveness of our education programs for students, students will be given a

mini-quiz after each program lecture. Monitors will walk around and make sure that the students

are not copying or talking to one another during the quizzes. The quizzes will not affect the

students’ grades in anyway, but will help us evaluate how much information they are attaining

from the program. We will collect the mini-quizzes and decipher what aspects of the program

need to be more emphasized.

The questions on the mini-quizzes will be multiple choices and ask generalized questions

from the lecture. For example, on a lecture about Vitamin C, a sample question would include:

“What breakfast item has the most vitamin C?” with the multiple choice answers: “A. Orange

Juice B. Cheerios C. Toast and Peanut Butter D. Melon”. As stated before, after reviewing all of

our materials, we will adjust our campaign to better educate and help students based on their

needs and desires.