Abstract
In 2006, the Council of Better Business Bureaus and 10 leading US food and beverage companies and quick-serve restaurants launched the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), an advertising self-regulation program, to encourage healthier dietary choices by shifting advertising primarily directed to children to foods that have fewer calories; are lower in sugars, sodium, and fat; and are more nutrient dense. Historically, regulation on children's advertising issues has focused on children aged 2 to 11 years (or children aged 2-12 years), and self regulation has focused on children aged 2 to 11 years. Thus, the CFBAI also is focused on advertising directed to children younger than 12 years. Initially, to promote participation and magnify the program's impact, the CFBAI permitted these companies, who represent the majority of food advertising to children on TV, to use, subject to the CFBAI's review and approval, company-specific nutrition criteria to identify healthier foods that could be advertised to children. This approach balanced flexibility (company-developed standards) with rigor (standards have to be consistent with established scientific and/or government standards and approved by the CFBAI). In July 2011, the CFBAI announced an agreement that new CFBAI-developed category-specific uniform nutrition criteria would become, as of December 31, 2013, the foundation for the child-directed advertising of the now 17 companies participating in the CFBAI ("participants"). At that time, the CFBAI posted a white paper it had prepared about the criteria on its Web site. To more widely inform the nutrition profession community about this development, this article provides an overview and summarizes the rationale for the criteria. The CFBAI and nutritionists and food scientists from the CFBAI's participants developed the new criteria after extensively reviewing the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, other respected nutrition standards or recommendations from organizations such as the Institute of Medicine, and criteria the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children had tentatively proposed. In addition to defining food categories and setting uniform criteria to be used by all participants, the new criteria are stronger overall than the prior company-specific criteria and will lead to further improvements and innovations in the foods advertised to children.