Many children in Ghana are growing up with poor-quality diets, shaped by unhealthy food choices and suboptimal early childhood feeding practices. Ghana Investment Opportunities
As a result, they fail to meet their dietary requirements for essential nutrients needed for healthy growth and development, contributing significantly to persistent undernutrition, while others consume diets high in processed foods rich in added sugars, salt, and unhealthy fats, resulting in overnutrition.
This convergence has created a major public health challenge, the double burden of malnutrition, where undernutrition, manifesting as stunting (low height-for-age), wasting (low weight-for-height), underweight (low weight-for-age), and micronutrient deficiencies (lack of essential vitamins and minerals or hidden hunger), coexist with overnutrition (overweight and obesity) within the same populations and communities.
Food marketing tactics and advertising contribute significantly to this issue, as children are constantly exposed to unhealthy food promotions, including influencer and celebrity endorsements, sports sponsorships, etc.
These messages strongly shape children’s preferences and influence parental purchasing decisions.
Over time, this shifts diets away from nutritious traditional foods toward heavily processed options, leading to poor eating habits from early childhood.
Recognising marketing grip
Most food companies target children, especially between the ages of six and twelve, because young minds react with emotion before reason.
At this stage, children cannot easily separate advertising from advice.
They take what they see at face value.
Companies use this to their advantage, relying on cartoon characters, bright colours, and catchy slogans to make unhealthy meals feel exciting.
Their goal is simply to turn cravings into demands.
Children encounter these messages everywhere on TV, social media, billboards, toys, games, store shelves, and even in schools.
Constant exposure builds familiarity, and familiarity builds desire.
The more they see it, the more they want it.
Recognising these channels is the first step for parents, teachers, and communities to protect children and promote healthier choices.
Hidden cost: Food marketing, nutrition crisis
Heavy marketing of sugary drinks, salty snacks, and ultra-processed foods pushes children to eat more empty calories and fewer nutrients.
Poor diets weaken children’s immune systems, affect brain development and learning, and make them more likely to fall sick.
As they grow older, these unhealthy eating patterns also increase the risk of long-term diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cancers, and heart conditions.
In Ghana, these non-communicable diseases now cause about four in 10 deaths, with poor childhood nutrition as a key driver. Ghana Investment Opportunities
Together, these health problems contribute to avoidable illness and even deaths among Ghanaian children.
Food ads don’t just change today’s lunchbox.
They shape health for life.
Way forward
The World Health Organisation calls for protecting children from unhealthy food marketing and addressing the double burden of malnutrition.
Strengthening controls on food advertising and improving the food environment are essential to safeguard and secure children’s health, improve nutrition, and reduce preventable disease and deaths in Ghana. Change requires coordinated action:
The government can restrict junk food advertisements (ads) during peak viewing hours and make healthy foods more affordable and accessible.
Families can respond by teaching children how advertising works, limiting exposure through ad-free media and screen time, planning meals, reading food labels, promoting balanced diets, ensuring adequate hydration, and involving children in cooking.
Schools must promote healthy food environments, with canteens prioritising nutritious, affordable meals so the healthy choice becomes the easy choice.
When policy, families, and schools act together, the focus shifts from reacting to preventing harm.
Food marketing is powerful, but it is not unstoppable.
When governments, schools, health workers, and families all play their part, we can create an environment where the healthy choice is also the easy choice for children.
Our children’s plates and their futures are worth fighting for.
