Those sugary Saturday mornings

Sally Copeland sometimes feels as if cartoon characters follow her through much of her day, constantly hawking sugary and fat-laden foods to her daughters.

In the grocery store, SpongeBob SquarePants, the daft hero of the Nickelodeon cartoon by the same name, seems to call out to her younger daughter, 4-year-old Fiona, from a carton of salty cheese crackers. Disney’s animated family the Incredibles appears to have convinced Copeland’s older daughter, 9-year-old Emma, that they too love the sugary breakfast cereal whose box they grace.

Even the bouncy songs and funny voices that sell food to kids on TV have cast a spell on her children, says Copeland, who lives in Culver City. Emma, who begs her mother not to distract her during the advertisements, does a pitch-perfect rendition of a jingle for a chocolate-chip-cookie cereal, and that is how she asks for it.

“Advertisements work, or they wouldn’t do it,” says Copeland of the food companies that spend as much as $15 billion per year to market their products to children. “But they’re certainly not supporting my message” that healthful foods are the way to go, she adds. “There isn’t a commercial on there for how delicious an apple would be right now. So they’re not going to come out and say, ‘Mommy, I’d like an apple.’ ”

Parents like Copeland say they must have superhero powers of their own to counter the power of the marketing -- advertisements, product packaging, contests and promotions -- that aims to sell food to their children. And many acknowledge that they’re losing the fight.

In recent months, parents concerned about childhood obesity have been supported by natural allies such as physicians, public health officials and regulation-friendly watchdog groups. This month, however, parents got a new and more surprising ally, the maker of nutritionally suspect kid favorites such as Oreos and Cocoa Pebbles cereal.

In mid-January the nation’s largest food company, Kraft Foods Inc., proposed a partial truce, promising to curb advertising of some of its most popular kids’ foods to children under 12. By next year, says Kraft, children’s television advertisements for many of its Nabisco cookies, Oscar Mayer Lunchables packs and Post kids’ cereals will end, unless the products can be reformulated to fit the company’s new criteria for foods that can be marketed as healthier choices.

Mark Berlind, Kraft’s executive vice president for global corporate affairs, acknowledged that parents “are concerned about the mix of food products being advertised to younger children” and called the initiatives “part of our ongoing efforts to address that concern.”

A wary food industry is applauding the move, even as its members wonder how they can keep up.

The average child watches more than 40,000 television commercials per year, according to a report by the American Psychological Assn. And the Institute of Medicine concluded recently that more than half of the TV ads directed at children promote candy, fast food, soft drinks and sweetened breakfast cereals that are high in calories and fat and low in fiber and essential nutrients.

Those findings, against the backdrop of a doubling in the rate of child obesity over the last 30 years, have focused sharp new attention on the role of food-industry marketing and the health of the nation’s children. It is a debate not heard since the Jimmy Carter administration, when the Federal Trade Commission proposed to regulate advertising of cavity-promoting foods to children, and Congress passed legislation to block the FTC bid. That block is still in effect, although Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and at least two independent groups have called for its repeal.

Kraft’s announcement came as a new committee of the Institute of Medicine begins to probe the role of marketing strategies in shaping children’s food and beverage choices. The national panel of physicians and public health experts, which meets publicly for the first time this week in Washington, D.C., will draft recommendations for Congress and the Bush administration on how current marketing strategies could be used to promote healthy dietary choices by the nation’s kids.

That advice will follow recommendations from the Institute’s Committee on Prevention of Obesity in Children and Youth that industry should develop marketing and advertising guidelines that minimize the risk of obesity in kids. That panel of national experts, convened under the umbrella of the National Academy of Sciences, also concluded that the Federal Trade Commission “should have the authority and resources” to monitor compliance with those guidelines.

Those recommendations, released last fall, further stated that the secretary of Health and Human Services should convene a national conference to develop guidelines for the advertising and marketing of “foods, beverages and sedentary entertainment directed at children and youth.”

Last February, a task force of the American Psychological Assn. went even further. After a three-year review of research and practices in advertising aimed at children, the group of professional psychologists concluded that children younger than 8 do not have the intellectual maturity to understand and assess the advertising messages they see every day on television.

Although many young children know that a commercial is different from regular television programming, they do not understand the persuasive intent behind an advertisement, says Dale Kunkel, professor of communication at the University of Arizona and principal author of the report. The result, the association concluded, is that televised advertising aimed at youngsters amounts to exploitation of a vulnerable group, and policymakers should take steps to restrict it.

“The 8-year-old does not typically understand the bias and exaggeration that are very typically associated with TV advertising. They can’t grasp the ways in which they are manipulated or the ways the products’ qualities are exaggerated,” says Kunkel.

Copeland recognizes the reverence -- and the credulity -- with which her young daughters receive these pitches from cartoon characters. “It’s sort of like with adults: ‘If the doctor says it, it must be right.’ Well, for children, it’s ‘If it’s on the TV, it must be right,’ ” she says.

The Bush administration has acted on none of the recent recommendations directed at the executive branch. But in breaking ranks with the food industry to announce its initiatives earlier this month, Kraft Foods called the Institute of Medicine committee’s recommendations “constructive” and called on those with an interest in food advertising to “join together to make real progress on this issue.”

The Grocery Manufacturers of America, which represents most of the nation’s food and beverage producers, has pledged that its members are doing, and will do, more to address the problem of children’s obesity. But the organization has made clear it opposes regulation of advertising to kids. In the wake of the Institute of Medicine’s September findings, the group insisted that the industry’s current mechanism of self-regulation -- the Better Business Bureau’s Children’s Advertising Review Unit -- provides “a mechanism that is perfectly suited to the task” of safeguarding children.

Copeland says she will take the help, even though she suspects the motives of those who would sell her children chocolate-chip breakfast cereal and cookies jammed with trans-fatty acids. But she’d like even more assistance in her fight to keep her daughters healthy, and she’s not sure that a food manufacturer can reformulate its offerings to fit the bill.

“How wonderful it would be if there were SpongeBob apples or SpongeBob bananas. That kind of thing could make a world of difference,” she says.