Lifelong Customers

Try this the next time you are in the supermarket. Walk to the breakfast aisle and crouch down until your eyes are at the height of a four-year-old. Suddenly the shelves speak. A cartoon tiger, a talking rabbit, a smiling bee. Boxes in every colour that nature rarely produces. Little cut-out toys, puzzles on the back, a promise of fun on the front. The adults’ cereals, plain and brown and dull, are higher up, at the level of a grown-up’s gaze.

Little about this aisle is accidental. Its shelves, packaging and advertising are planned by people whose job is to make a child ask for a particular box, and then keep asking for it, for years. This is a story about those people and their toolbox. About how an occasional treat became a legitimate meal. About what a diet built in laboratories does to a growing body, and to the taste buds that will guide it for the rest of its life. And about what we adults are trying to compensate for when we say yes, again, because we do not want our children to miss out.

What Children Actually Eat

First, a definition, because the words matter. Ultra-processed food, in the NOVA classification researchers use, is not simply food that has been cooked or packaged. It is an industrial formulation of food substances with little or no whole food in it, typically with added flavours, colours and other cosmetic additives. Think of the sweetened breakfast cereal, the fruit-flavoured yoghurt, the nugget, the flavoured milk, the packaged snack. Now the numbers.

In the United States, children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 got 67 percent of their calories from ultra-processed food in 2017 to 2018, up from 61.4 percent in 1999 to 2000, according to a study in JAMA. Over the same two decades, the share from unprocessed or minimally processed food fell from 28.8 to 23.5 percent. In the UK, adolescents get around two-thirds of their calories from ultra-processed food in national diet surveys, with a higher share among disadvantaged teenagers (68.4 percent against 63.8 percent), and even two-to-five-year-olds got 61 percent, more than in any of six other countries compared. An Imperial College analysis found that 64 percent of the calories in meals provided by UK schools came from ultra-processed food. In Australia, the 2011 to 2012 national survey found that older children and adolescents were the biggest consumers, at 53.1 and 54.3 percent of energy, against 42 percent for the population as a whole.

Continental Europe looks different, but the data on children are patchier. Italy’s national survey of 2010 to 2013 put the figure for ages 5 to 19 at about 26 percent. A 2026 review in Frontiers in Nutrition notes, though, that a 2025 Italian survey found over half of children eating sweet snacks more than three times a week, with a notable rise in ready-to-eat and ultra-processed foods. The surveys differ in year, age group and method, so the bars above are not strictly comparable. But in every country with repeat data, the arrow points one way. And across eight countries, a higher share of ultra-processed food in a child’s diet went with a more energy-dense diet, more free sugars and less fibre.

“I Had Chips Too, and I’m Fine”

It is the sentence most of us have heard, or said. I had chips when I was growing up and I am fine. It is said kindly, usually, and it deserves a kind answer, which has two parts: how many, and how fine?

How many? The chips are not the issue. It is how often, how much, and what else is on the plate. A study by Barry Popkin and Carmen Piernas of the University of North Carolina tracked more than 31,000 American children across four national surveys between 1977 and 2006. Over those three decades, children’s calories from snacks rose by 168 a day, to an average of 586, and by 2006 snacks supplied more than 27 percent of everything children ate. The children were moving, the authors wrote, toward a pattern of three meals plus three snacks a day. The biggest increase was in salty snacks and candy, and the steepest rise was among two-to-six-year-olds, who added 181 calories a day. At the same time, fresh fruit as a snack declined while fruit juice rose. The occasional bag of crisps of our childhood has become a standing fixture of the day.

And how fine, really? Here I would gently suggest a wider look at the adults raised in the industrialised world. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic compared life expectancy with years lived in good health, the “healthspan”, across 183 countries. The gap between the two, years lived burdened by disease, has widened worldwide, reaching 9.6 years in 2019, up from 8.5 in 2000. The United States has the widest gap, at 12.4 years, up from 10.9 in 2000, followed by Australia (12.1), New Zealand (11.8), the United Kingdom (11.3) and Norway (11.2). We are living longer, but we are spending more of those years unwell. The authors tie the widening gap to the rise in noncommunicable diseases. It would be wrong to blame food alone, since the world has changed in a hundred ways, and the study does not claim so. But a generation that looks back at its snacks and says it is fine might look at those numbers and ask: fine compared with what?

The chip itself may not have changed much. What has changed is everything around it: the number of occasions, the portion, the sweetened drink beside it, and the cereal, the yoghurt and the bar that now share the day with, or stand in for, a plate of real food.

The Cornflake That Was Meant to Be Boring

The story of the breakfast cereal begins with a doctor who wanted to suppress desire. In 1894, at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, the superintendent, John Harvey Kellogg, a physician and devout Seventh-day Adventist, put his patients on strict, bland, largely vegetarian diets. He believed that plain foods, especially grains and nuts, would dampen excitement and arousal, while meat and seasoned, flavourful food would stoke them. The story goes that he and his younger brother Will Keith Kellogg left some cooked wheat standing while they dealt with other business, rolled it out and found that it broke into flakes. The flake was meant to be dull. It was, one might say, cardboard on purpose.

Will Keith Kellogg saw something else in it. In 1906 he founded his own company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, and added sugar to make the flakes palatable to a mass market, which caused a lasting rift with his brother. Then he did what the industry has done ever since: he marketed. In 1907, the company offered a free box of cereal to any woman who winked at her grocer. In 1909 it added a free booklet of “Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures” for anyone who bought two boxes. A food invented as an instrument against desire had been turned into a machine for producing it.

The journey from there to the modern cereal aisle is a short one. Sugar was followed by toys, and toys by characters. By 2009, researchers at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale were able to document what had come of it. Cereals marketed directly to children had 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fibre and 60 percent more sodium than those marketed to adults. Some of the best-known were 44 percent sugar by weight, nearly half the contents of the box, and 42 percent of child-targeted cereals contained artificial dyes, against 5 percent of adult cereals. The average American preschooler saw more than 500 cereal commercials a year, and a national audit found that child-targeted cereals were given more shelf space and more middle and lower shelf positions than other cereals. Food companies have since reformulated some products, and television exposure has fallen, but a more recent analysis from the Rudd Center, now at the University of Connecticut, still found that the more advertising was aimed directly at children, the more high-sugar cereal households with children bought.

This is how a treat became a meal. Not by a decision that anyone took at the kitchen table, but by decades of small, well-funded nudges, each of which made the sweet breakfast a little more normal, until it was simply what a child eats in the morning.

The Toolbox

If you wanted to design a system for creating lifelong customers, you would start where preferences are formed, in childhood, and you would use every instrument available. The industry does.

First, the message. Characters, colour, shelf position, free gifts and, more recently, games and influencers all aim at the same target: a child’s attention and a child’s request. Does it work? A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics, pooling 80 studies and more than 19,000 children and adolescents, concluded that food marketing is associated with increased intake, choice, preference and purchase requests. In experiments, children who watched food advertising on television ate on average 60 extra calories, and those who played food-branded advergames 53 extra calories, compared with children shown non-food adverts. Another review found that celebrity and influencer promotion raised children’s consumption of the marketed products by about 56 calories. Those are modest amounts in a single sitting, but nobody sees one advertisement. The World Health Organization’s 2022 review of 143 studies found that the promotion of unhealthy foods dominates the places where children gather and the screens they watch, and that it is increasingly moving into digital media and social networks, where children engage and interact with brands.

Second, the product. Marketing gets the food into the trolley. Engineering gets it eaten. The most telling experiment came from the US National Institutes of Health. Twenty adults lived in a research ward for a month, eating an ultra-processed diet for two weeks and an unprocessed diet for another two, in random order. The two menus were matched for calories, sugar, fat, fibre and macronutrients on offer, and people could eat as much or as little as they liked. On the ultra-processed diet, they ate on average 508 more calories a day, ate faster and gained about 0.9 kilograms in two weeks, although they did not rate the meals as tastier. On the unprocessed diet, they lost weight. The lead researcher, Kevin Hall, suspected that something about the texture and sensory properties made the food quicker and easier to eat. This was a small trial in adults, not children, and a short one. But it makes a point that the old arguments about willpower miss: a food can be designed so that the signal to stop arrives late.

Combine the two and you have the full toolbox: a message that makes a child want it, and a product built to be hard to stop eating.

The “Yoghurt” That Is Not, and the Fun Food at Every Meal

I keep coming back to a simple question. Why can a child not just have a yoghurt, perhaps with a few pieces of fruit? Why must the product on the shelf, which carries the name of yoghurt and a cartoon on its lid, be a sugar and flavouring concoction that bears the name of yoghurt and not much more?

It is not a matter of impression. In 2026, Action on Salt & Sugar at Queen Mary University of London surveyed 104 yoghurts marketed to children in the UK. The average contained 8.2 grams of sugars per 100 grams, ranging from 4.7 to 14.1 grams, and only two of the 104 were low in sugar. Milk itself supplies about 3.8 grams of sugars per 100 grams, so much of the rest is free sugar added on top. The highest, a yoghurt branded with Nestlé’s Smarties sweets, had 14.1 grams of sugars per 100 grams, which comes to 15.1 grams in a single pot, nearly four teaspoons. An earlier survey in BMJ Open of more than 900 UK yoghurts found the same pattern: children’s yoghurts had a median of 10.8 grams of sugar per 100 grams, while natural and Greek-style yoghurt had 5.0 grams, almost all of it lactose. The authors’ advice was refreshingly plain: natural or Greek yoghurt with fresh whole fruit for sweetness adds no free sugar.

The pattern extends beyond yoghurt. A review of child-targeted marketing in supermarkets found that products high in fat, sugar and sodium are the ones that most commonly use child-targeted techniques on their packaging. Fun, in other words, is the wrapper, and it is attached disproportionately to the least nutritious food. And so every meal acquires its “fun” food, the character-shaped, the brightly coloured, the one with a toy or a joke, until a plain plate of real food begins to look like a punishment. I find that a strange place to have arrived. Food is meant to nourish, and to connect a child to a family, a table, a land and a community. It is not meant to deliver a sugar high mixed with Red 40.

A word on that dye, because the evidence deserves to be reported fairly. Red 40 (Allura Red, or E129 in Europe) is one of several synthetic colours that were tested in a 2007 UK trial of 153 three-year-olds and 144 children aged eight and nine. Mixtures of dyes and a preservative produced a small but significant increase in hyperactivity, and since 2010 the European Union has required foods containing the colour to carry a warning that it “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”. In 2021, California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment concluded that synthetic dyes can cause or worsen neurobehavioural problems in some children. California banned them from school food in 2024, and in 2025 the US FDA announced a plan to phase out petroleum-based dyes, Red 40 among them. The effects are modest and seen in some children, not all, and the trials tested mixtures, not single dyes. But when the purpose of a colour is purely to make a product look more exciting to a child, it is fair to ask why it is there at all.

What It Does to a Growing Body and Mind

For most of the twentieth century, type 2 diabetes was known as adult-onset diabetes. The name no longer fits. In the US, the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth study, run with the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, found that the incidence of type 2 diabetes among 10- to 19-year-olds rose from 9.0 to 13.8 cases per 100,000 between 2002 and 2015, an increase of 4.8 percent a year, and a later paper describes an effective doubling between 2002 and 2018. An earlier analysis of the same study, covering 2002 to 2012, estimated that approximately 3,800 US youths were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the first year and 5,300 in the last. A caution is due: the disease is still rare below the age of 10 (181 cases over 13 years in the study), so this is mainly a story of adolescence. But it is a harsher disease than the adult version. Young people with type 2 diabetes followed for about eight years developed kidney disease, retinopathy and neuropathy at higher rates than those with type 1, and NIDDK notes that the condition is harder to treat in youth, with complications appearing early in life.

Behind the diagnoses sits a larger group. In a CDC analysis of national survey data from 2005 to 2016, 18 percent of US adolescents aged 12 to 18, about one in five, had prediabetes, as did 24 percent of young adults, and the rate was higher among those with obesity (25.7 percent against 16.4 percent).

What about growth, development and the mind? Here the evidence is of a different kind, and I want to be careful. A diet dominated by ultra-processed food crowds out other foods. In Australia’s national survey, a higher share of calories from ultra-processed food went with lower dietary diversity and lower micronutrient intake, and in eight countries a higher share went with a more energy-dense diet, more free sugars and less fibre in children. On mental health, systematic reviews of observational studies link high consumption in children and adolescents to anxiety, depression, irritability and sleep disturbances. An umbrella review in Nutrition Reviews found only one meta-analysis in children, associating junk food with higher odds of depression, with very high heterogeneity between studies. A 2026 study of adolescents in BMC Medicine found that higher intake went with more behavioural and emotional problems, but not with ADHD symptoms, and its authors noted that the association might run both ways, since a low mood can also push a teenager toward such foods.

So the honest summary is this. For obesity, blood sugar and diet quality, the signal is strong and consistent. For mental health and development, it is a concerning pattern in observational data that has not been shown to be causal. Neither is a reason to be complacent.

“Everything in Moderation”

It is the other sentence we all know, and it sounds like wisdom, because it is old. “Nothing in excess” was inscribed at the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, at least as early as the fifth century BC, and Plato has Socrates credit the legendary Seven Sages with it. It was advice about the character of a person facing a table, a call for self-command. It was not a promise that any food is harmless in small amounts. The Greeks were not facing a hundred thousand products designed by food scientists.

The message of balance has also had a commercial life. In 2015, the New York Times revealed that Coca-Cola had given $1.5 million to start a nonprofit, the Global Energy Balance Network, whose scientists stressed the importance of exercise and downplayed diet in obesity, and had provided close to $4 million for other projects led by two of its founders. The nutrition scholar Marion Nestle called it a front group for the company. Coca-Cola said it was committed to transparency and to scientists’ freedom to share their own views. Academics who have studied the episode argue that “energy balance” and “balance” messaging served the industry well: it suggested that people could eat whatever they liked and exercise it off, and it kept discussion away from measures such as soda taxes.

But the deeper problem with “everything in moderation” is a practical one. Moderation presumes that we can tell when we have had enough. The NIH trial I described earlier suggests that engineered food undermines exactly that. When adults were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, they ate roughly 500 more calories a day of the ultra-processed menu, and they ate faster, although the menus were matched on the nutrients offered and the participants did not find the food tastier. Ultra-processed products also tend to be low in fibre, one of the things that tells the body it has been fed: across eight countries, a higher share of ultra-processed food in children’s diets went with less fibre and more free sugars. A food that is soft, sweet, quick to eat and light on the signals of fullness does not lend itself to a pause.

Now ask the same of a five-year-old. We expect a child to show restraint around a food that made adults in a carefully supervised study eat hundreds of extra calories a day.

Moderation, in a food environment like this one, is not a virtue we can demand of children. It is a condition we have to arrange for them.

What Are We Afraid They Will Miss?

Most of us know, at some level, that a child should not live on cereal, sweet yoghurts and snacks. And yet when the request comes, again, for the lolly, the biscuit, the other thing, we find it extraordinarily hard to hold the line. The phrase that comes up is always the same: I do not want them to miss out.

Miss out on what, exactly? Consider an 18-month-old and a slice of cake. The child has no concept of birthdays, no memory of cake, no meaning attached to the gelato. It is we adults who project our own picture of childhood onto the child: the party, the treat, the sweetness as a sign of love and fun. The guidance, in fact, is clear. In 2023 the World Health Organization’s guideline on complementary feeding recommended that children under two should not consume foods high in sugar, salt and trans fats, or sugar-sweetened drinks, and the US Dietary Guidelines for 2020 to 2025 went further, advising that foods and drinks with added sugars be avoided in the first two years, while the advisory committee behind them noted that early nutrition helps shape taste preferences and food choices. The industry has not made this easy. A Spanish survey of 100 commercial complementary foods for infants found that 61 percent contained added sugars.

I suspect there is more going on, and I say so with the humility of a parent. A sweet thing is the quickest way to give a child pleasure, to end a tantrum, to reward, to console, to buy ten minutes of peace at the end of a long day. It is a currency cheaper than time and attention. And each of us carries a memory of what childhood is supposed to taste like.

But holding a boundary does not mean prohibition, and the research on that point is just as important. In a series of experiments that began in the 1990s, Jennifer Fisher and Leann Birch found that restricting preschoolers’ access to a palatable food increased their desire for it and their intake once it became available, and that parents who restricted more had daughters who ate more in the absence of hunger. A meta-analysis of 24 studies later linked restrictive feeding with greater food responsiveness and emotional overeating in children. One widely taught alternative is what the American dietitian and family therapist Ellyn Satter calls the division of responsibility. The adult decides what is offered, when and where. The child decides whether to eat it and how much. The boundary is drawn at the shopping trolley and the pantry, calmly and without drama, and not at the table with a lecture. We do not have to turn a biscuit into a forbidden fruit. We only have to stop making it a staple.

How a Palate Is Made

Why does an Indian baby take to lassi and curry, a Vietnamese child to pho and a Mexican child to hot sauce? The short answer is that children eat what their culture eats, and the science of how that happens is remarkable.

A palate begins to form before birth. The foods and spices a mother eats flavour her amniotic fluid and, later, her breast milk. In a classic experiment by Julie Mennella and colleagues at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, infants whose mothers had drunk carrot juice during pregnancy or lactation accepted carrot-flavoured cereal more readily at weaning. Mennella has noted that she could not find a single flavour that did not show up in the womb. The flavour principles of a culture, in other words, may reach a child before the first spoonful. After that, exposure and example do the rest: children learn, mostly by repeated, relaxed contact, to like what is familiar and what the people they love are eating.

But the learning is not symmetrical, and this is the heart of the matter. We are born with a liking for sweetness. Children readily accept energy-dense foods high in sugar and salt on first presentation, whereas vegetables may need eight to ten exposures, offered in a supportive, non-coercive setting, before they are accepted. That innate arrangement, a head start on sweet and a hurdle at bitter, may once have suited a world where sweet food was scarce. In an environment where the sweetest, softest and most uniform foods are available every day, and are marketed to children with cartoon characters, the head start becomes a very long lead.

So what happens to a child’s preferences when much of the diet is engineered, not grown? I want to be honest here: no one has run the long-term experiment, and the direct evidence in children is limited. But the logic of the research on exposure is hard to ignore. Children learn to like what they eat repeatedly. A child whose repeated exposures are sweet, uniform, brightly coloured and effortless to chew is learning that those are the flavours and textures of food. A child whose repeated exposures are fruit, vegetables, fish, legumes and spices from the family table is learning something else. Over the years, the first child’s taste may have been shaped far less by the family than by the people who designed the product.

That is the most hopeful thing I know about all this. Preferences are learned, which means they can be taught, early, without force, one ordinary meal at a time.

Questions Parents Ask

The Price of Convenience

Ultra-processed food is sold on convenience, and the convenience is real. It saves time and, as the researchers behind the NIH trial pointed out, it often costs less in both time and money, which matters a great deal to families who have very little of either. I do not want to pretend that a tired parent at the end of a shift is making a moral failure when she opens a box. Her choices were shaped by a food system designed to make that box the easiest option in the room.

But convenience has a price, and it is paid later, and by someone else. It is paid in children who, in some countries, take well over half their calories from products made for profit, in a rise in type 2 diabetes among adolescents, in a gap between how long we live and how long we live well that is widening everywhere and widest in countries such as the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, which also rank high in ultra-processed intake. It is paid in palates that never learned to enjoy a pear, a lentil or a piece of fish, and in the quiet loss of the table as the place where a child learns what their family, their land and their community eat.

Somewhere along the way, we began to think of food as fuel and entertainment, and of health as something that happens in clinics. When did we lose sight of the fact that what we eat is one of the most powerful things we do for our health?

The encouraging news is that none of this needs a revolution in the kitchen. A plain yoghurt with real fruit adds no free sugar and costs less effort than most of us imagine. Oats, eggs, leftovers from last night’s supper, a piece of fruit: breakfast does not have to be a performance, or a product. Reading the first three ingredients on a label tells you much of what you need to know. And a boundary, held calmly and without a lecture, is a gift that a child will not thank us for until much later.

My grandest hope is a modest one. That a child’s breakfast could once again be nothing more than food, and that the cartoon on the box could go back to being only a cartoon.

Sources

Gina Sakic Editor-in-Chief of GlamBon. Born in Croatia and educated in Italy and Australia, with a career spanning the Melbourne International Film Festival, corporate video production and functional nutrition. Now based in Tuscany, she writes at the intersection of culture, health and sustainability.