Researchers have found that the combination of kiddie meals, toys and TV ads can lead to more frequent family visits to fast-food restaurants.  

In a recent study by Jennifer Emond, who is from Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine in New Hampshire, along with her colleagues, they found out that TV advertisements of fast-food companies that feature kids meals with toy premiums, will prompt the children to request their parents to bring them to the restaurant.

            Health Day News reported that the more often kids watch TV channels that advertised children's fast-food meals, the more often their families went to the restaurants running the ads.

            Researchers analyzed database of all the fast-food TV ads that were aired internationally since 2009, and found out that only two fast-food chains were engaged in child-directed TV advertising at that time, and 79 percent of these ads are aired in just four children's networks.

            The study was conducted to 100 children aging from three to seven years old along with one of their parents. The parents were asked to complete a survey which included questions about how often their children watched each of the four children's networks, if their children requested visits to the two restaurants, if their children collected toys from those restaurants, and how often the family visited those restaurants. 

            Thirty-seven percent of the parents have reported that their family had more frequent visits to the fast-food restaurant with the child-directed TV ads.

            Out of the 29 percent of children who collected toys from the restaurants, almost 83 percent requested to visit one or both of the restaurants, while 54 percent of the children requested visits to at least one of the restaurants.

            Factors that were associated with more frequent visits include more TVs in the home, a TV in the child's bedroom, more time spent watching TV during the day, and more time spent watching one of the four children's networks airing the majority of child-directed ads.

            Even with the small number of participants, the study clearly showed that children tend to request to go to the fast-food restaurant that offered toys as a premium in their TV ads.

             "For now, our best advice to parents is to switch their child to commercial-free TV programming to help avoid pestering for foods seen in commercials," Dr Emond noted.

The study was published in the Journal of Pediatrics.