Experts urge kids’ comic the Beano to stop promoting junk food brands
Many of the comic’s online quizzes revolve around food high in fat, salt and sugar. Experts call it “incredibly irresponsible” and want the company to change its policy
The website of the UK children’s comic the Beano describes itself as “100% safe for children” - but is its junk food-related content doing more harm than good?
An investigation by The BMJ shows how the Beano’s website - promoted as a digital hub for 6- to 12-year-olds - showcases products from well-known brands that are harmful to children, including fast food, confectionery, soft drinks and ultra-processed food.
Since its launch in 2016, 47.9 million children have visited beano.com, which includes frequent references to well known high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) brands, explain Claire Mulrenan and Mark Petticrew at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and freelance journalist Harry Wallop.
For example, there is a ‘Ultimate McDonald’s Quiz,’ ‘How Well do you know the Nando’s Menu’ quiz, and a ‘Skittles jokes’ page. There is also an ‘Ultimate Food Logo’ quiz, whose ten answers are: Greggs, Heinz, Pizza Hut, Nando’s, Subway, Domino’s, Quorn, KFC, Pizza Express and Burger King.
There is even a quiz that features alcohol, with the question ‘how long have humans been making beer for?’ accompanied by an image of a pint being poured.
There is no suggestion that any of these quizzes have been paid for by the brands themselves, which could be deemed as a form of advertising known as “advergames” under the self-regulating UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing (CAP).
Health campaigners, however, are disappointed with Beano’s willingness to showcase so many junk food brands – and to put these brands right at the front of children’s minds, suggesting that a chocolate, fizzy drink or burger brand is “cool” – even if it’s not taking money from the companies themselves.
With estimates that 22% of reception aged schoolchildren are overweight or obese, rising to 37% of children by year 6, health experts are also deeply concerned.
Kat Jenner, director of nutrition, research, campaigns, and policy at the Obesity Health Alliance, says, “It is an incredibly irresponsible way of promoting unhealthy food,” while Boyd Swinburn, professor of population nutrition and global health at the University of Auckland and honorary professor at the Global Obesity Centre in Melbourne, believes that the company is being “naive” in giving “free advertising” to HFSS brands and products.
Through these quizzes and games, beano.com also collects data on children’s consumption preferences, which is then sold, on an anonymised basis, to companies looking to find out more about what children like and don’t like.
Beano insists that its surveys meet all legal and data protection obligations, and say “any suggestion that Beano is somehow contributing to increased consumption of HFSS products in children is false, misleading and damaging.”
Nevertheless, campaigners say that there’s a question around whether the company has an ethical duty to safeguard child health, write the authors.
Henry Dimbleby, lead author of the National Food Strategy, which called for a salt and sugar tax on processed food, says: “People at Beano might be thinking: ‘Oh, well, you know, it's just a little bit of fun, that's what the kids like.’ But I just think it is all pervasive in society. This stuff invades every element of their lives.”
Former health minister James Bethell agrees. Pointing to UK government plans to delay a ban on junk food adverts before 9pm on TV and online, he says: “What annoys me about this is just the relentlessness of it in young people's lives. There's no escape.”
Because Beano says that it hasn’t taken money from any of the HFSS brands that so often feature in its quizzes, the stricter (and now delayed) rules about marketing junk food to children would not stop the company from continuing to showcase so many burgers, pizzas, crisps, and fizzy drinks or from suggesting that these brands were “cool” write the authors.
Nor would it stop the comic running Forknite, a game fronted by one of its characters Minnie the Minx who has “been served up a plate of vile veg and she needs your help to eat them and defeat them!”.
J. Bernadette Moore, associate professor of obesity at the University of Leeds, says, “This idea that children won’t like healthy food pervades all aspects of our society. Yet companies with such extensive young audiences must acknowledge that they are not merely reflecting child preferences but shaping them."
Beano responded, “We take enormous care in what we present to children particularly around health and wellbeing,” adding that its website also runs some positive content about fruit, vegetables, and healthy eating, including the “Ultimate Vegetarian Quiz.”
But Swinburn argues that Beano must do better, and he called on the company to change its policy and to no longer showcase products that are harmful to children - including alcohol, fast food, confectionery, soft drinks, and ultra-processed food.
He concludes, “Corporations which are clever enough to capture and hold children’s attention need to have very high ethical standards to ensure that they are not exploiting those same children by promoting unhealthy products to them.”
JOURNAL
The BMJ
METHOD OF RESEARCH
News article
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Big Macs and the Beano: Is it time for the comic to drop the junk food brands?
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
1-Feb-2023
Lianhuanhua – Chinese comics as a specific cultural form
IMAGE: SINOLOGIST LENA HENNINGSEN RECEIVES ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANT. view more
CREDIT: PHOTO: PROVIDED. UNIVERSITY OF FREIBURG
Sinologist PD Dr. Lena Henningsen from the University of Freiburg has been awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to fund her research project on comic culture in the People’s Republic of China. The European Union grant is one of the most prestigious awards for researchers in the EU. It is worth two million euros over a period of five years.
Independent Genre and Research Field
Henningsen’s project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” is devoted to Chinese comics as an independent cultural form: “‘Lianhuanhua’ – translated literally, linked images – are still largely unexplored,” says Henningsen. “Our project explores the intellectual, political, social, historical, and transcultural dimensions of this exciting medium.” Henningsen and her team will analyze comics from the People’s Republic of China with regard to Chinese and global comic culture – as well as the specific conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. In the process, they will also address the question of whether and to what extent comics further the goals of state propaganda, such as the legitimization of the Communist Party of China, the creation of the “new socialist man,” and nation building – or whether they counteract these goals.
In clearly circumscribed case studies, the project analyzes adaptations into comics from literature and film, the conventions of text-image relations (and the breaking of these conventions), narrative qualities, as well as the visual language of lianhuanhua which is very much indebted to other visual forms of art, including traditional Chinese visual art, cartoons, propaganda posters, photography and movies. With its focus on practices and meaning making, ChinaComx moreover delves into the changing global cultural, political and economic connections within the socialist cultural sphere and beyond, tracing distinct and changing relationships of domestic and foreign elements. The project will cover developments since the late 1940s to the present and situate concrete phenomena within larger developments and traditions. “Our project has the goal of defining the term ‘Lianhuanhua’ as a distinct genre arising from a specific context as well as an independent research field,” says Henningsen, “similar to ‘mangas’ or ‘bandes dessinĂ©es.’”
Literature, Pop, Society
Lena Henningsen served from 2012 to 2022 as a junior professor at the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Sinology and is currently Principal Investigator of the research project “The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China (READCHINA)”. In it, she and her team are studying intellectual, literary, and social change in China since the 1940s from the perspective of reading practices. She has already received an ERC Starting Grant for this project. Her research foci also include modern Chinese literature and culture, contemporary Chinese society, intellectual property and plagiarism, and pop culture and music in China. Henningsen was an elected member of the “Young Academy” from 2013 to 2018 and received the Leopoldina Early Career Award in 2016.
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