According to the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, children are exposed to over 5,500 food commercials a year promoting the consumption of high sugar foods, such as breakfast cereal, sodas, fast food, and snacks. These advertisements play a large role in encouraging young kids to indulge in bad eating habits in comparison to the mere 100 food commercials a year kids see promoting fruits, vegetables, and water. This type of behavior by large food industries is just one of the many ways the health halo of advertising can be manipulating to the human mind. Children, especially, are vulnerable to the closed curtain work of false advertisement because they go by what society tells them, by what these large companies tell them. An example of a well-advertised food product aimed at children is the cereal Reese’s Puffs. In their attempt at advertisment on the television,they show young kids waking up in an unusually upbeat mood, dance down the stairs, and turn items of their house into different aspects of the cereal, such as its “peanut butter chocolate flavor.” Seeing other kids get such a kick out of just consuming the product manipulates the young minds of children into thinking what they see on the commercial will happen to them too if they purchase and consume the food. This method of advertisement is manipulative, yet effective, and only goes to show how much profit lies in the industry of children directed ads.

According to National Institue of Health, “it is estimated that over $1 billion is spent on media advertising to children, mostly on television, over $4.5 billion is spent on youth-targeted promotions such as premiums, sampling, coupons, contests, and sweepstakes, about $2 billion is spent on youth-targeted public relations, such as broadcast and print publicity, event marketing, and school relations, and roughly $3 billion is spent on packaging especially designed for children.”