Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Marketing to kids is essential for business
That was my take-home lesson from the article in the New York Times about advertising in magazines aimed at children. Thanks to Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest for pointing out the most telling quotes.
From the editor of Sports Illustrated Kids:
We’ve really built our business around a strategy, when it comes to advertising partners, of allowing them to really make use of our ability to get this youth audience in all the ways that they’re out there, so we get them in school, we get them in print, we get them when they’re out of school and having fun through sports.
From the editor of Boys’ Life:
We believe this is part of the learning process: why shield them from any of the marketing experience that comes with making a purchase decision?
Kids don’t have a chance against those kinds of attitudes, do they?
