Food adver­tis­ing does much more than influ­ence our brand pref­er­ences; it also ‘primes’ auto­matic eat­ing behav­iours, con­tribut­ing to over­all and longer-term weight gain.

This is the con­clu­sion of a recent study into whether food adver­tis­ing (of both the healthy and non-healthy kind) can trig­ger uncon­scious snack­ing by lead­ing our thoughts toward hunger and food.

Chil­dren con­sumed 45% more when exposed to food adver­tis­ing. Adults con­sumed more of both healthy and unhealthy snack foods fol­low­ing expo­sure to snack food adver­tis­ing com­pared to the other con­di­tions. In both exper­i­ments, food adver­tis­ing increased con­sump­tion of prod­ucts not in the pre­sented adver­tise­ments, and these effects were not related to reported hunger or other con­scious influences.

Ryan Sager con­sid­ers the research ratio­nally and won­ders what this means to the future of food adver­tis­ing (polit­i­cal impo­tence):

I’m sure the public-health com­mu­nity prob­a­bly sees this as a nice ratio­nale for ban­ning food ads of any kind. But I think it points to a more basic truth that under­lies why try­ing to con­trol things like this is use­less: We’re con­stantly influ­enced by sub­con­scious effects like this. […] There are a mil­lion things that can prime you to mind­less eat­ing. The indi­vid­ual just has to be aware of this and maybe not have snacks at hand at all times.

What­ever one’s indi­vid­ual strat­egy, try­ing to con­trol such influ­ences at the soci­etal level is most likely pointless.