Interesting experiment published last year assessing the impact of cartoons on promoting healthy eating in kids:
“Children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: a comparison group was exposed to cartoons with no reference to food and an intervention group was exposed to cartoons with healthy eating messages. After viewing, each child was given the opportunity to eat for 10 minutes from a small selection of snack foods.
Children in the experimental group chose significantly more healthy food items than did those in the comparison group.”
I didn’t have access to the whole paper, just this abstract, but the conclusions are pretty clear. If you’re working in health promotion with kids, especially in promoting a healthy diet, get in touch with a cartoonist to help design your health promotion campaign! Science says so!
I have created many health promotion cartoons in Ireland over the years with the HSE and private organisations. I had a monthly cartoon strip in a newspaper published by the HSE with a positive health message. Issues covered included exercise for older people, breastfeeding, screentime for children, and healthy eating. Get in touch if you’ve a health promotion brief that requires an eye-catching visual element, or if you’d like to come up with original characters to impact the healthy eating choices of children. There are many ways this can be used to promote the healthy eating message, from comics and posters, to colouring pages featuring the characters and message. Wherever you are in the world I’ll be able to help you with your healthy eating or other campaign. Just get in touch, and once we have established a brief you will end up with a successful cartoon-based health promotion campaign!
Contact cartoonist Allan Cavanagh here.
via The Impact of Exposure to Cartoons Promoting Healthy Eating on Children’s Food Preferences and Choices. – PubMed – NCBI
