Though overall exposure to food advertising for children went down after a voluntary agreement to limit it, the amount of fast-food advertising went up, and most of the foods still marketed to kids are not good for them, according to a report out Monday.

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Associated Press

Children saw almost as many ads that pushed food high in saturated fat, sugar or sodium in 2009 as they did in 2003.

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In the report, published online in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, researchers looked at whether the advertising of such food and beverages to children had changed much since 2006, when many food companies joined the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a voluntary agreement to limit the number of unhealthful foods advertised on children's programming.

The researchers found that children ages 2 to 5 saw an average of 10.9 food and beverage ads a day on television in 2009 and that ages 6-11 saw 12.7, decreases of 17.8 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively, from 2003.

The commercials that advertised unhealthful foods -- those high in saturated fat, sugar or sodium -- decreased only from 94 percent to 86 percent, according to the study's lead author, Dr. Lisa M. Powell, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"On the one hand, exposure to food advertising seen by children has fallen, but on the other hand, the ads that kids continue to see, approximately nine in 10 are for products that are unhealthy," she said.

The fast-food advertising aimed at those two age groups went up 21.1 percent and 30.8 percent since 2003. Two of the largest fast-food advertisers, McDonald's and Burger King, have signed on to the agreement and did not increase much their ad exposure to children ages 2-5, Powell said.

"All of those fast-food companies that weren't members, their advertising increased substantially," she said. "So what we need to do is to get more fast-food companies on board to agree not to advertise to children."

Even when those companies advertise their more healthful meals with apple slices and milk, the default meal still comes with french fries and soda, said Dr. Jennifer L. Harris, the director of marketing initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.

"It's kind of a bait and switch," she said.

What the new study shows is that companies aren't making much difference in what food is marketed to children, said Harris, who was not involved in the study.

"The issue is that the companies think that they are making progress by making small tweaks to the nutrition quality of the products that they've been advertising to kids all along, whereas what the Powell paper shows is that those minor tweaks aren't really improving the nutrition quality of the products at all," she said.

Part of the problem might be that companies pledge not to advertise their unhealthful products on children's' programming but that kids see them on other shows, Powell said.

"You could think about it as the American Idol problem or other shows that are family-oriented that a lot of children are watching," she said. One solution could be a restriction on what hours those ads air, keeping them out of the afternoon and early-evening hours, Powell said.

All of the guidelines have been voluntary, and though some progress has been made, such as recently suggested common nutritional standards, there is a need for more in coming years, she said.

"If we don't start to see some significant changes in terms of the types of ads that kids are seeing, then we may need to think about formal regulation," Powell said.