1. Erin Reeve
Evolving Prior Breakfast Campaigns to Reduce the Childhood Obesity Rate
Many studies suggest that eating breakfast promotes weight control and weight
maintenance. In the midst of America’s obesity epidemic, many health communication
campaigns promote breakfast in an effort to reduce the childhood obesity rate in the United
States.Concurrent with prior campaigns that encourage children to eat breakfast were
advertisements and campaigns for new menu items from the fast food industry. Since 2005,
breakfast expenditures from fast food restaurants have risen 10 percent and are responsible for 66
percent of the industry’s total profits. It appears that although children were eating breakfast,
they were not considering the nutritional value of their choices.
Many priorcampaigns that encourage children to eat breakfastfailed toemphasizethe
importance of the meal’s nutritional content.Studies conducted by the Center for Science in the
Public Interest state that the meal’s nutritional content is just as important as making the decision
to eat breakfast. Although the debate of which is more important is controversial, the general
public sees the link from fast food to obesity as common knowledge. Therefore, it is important to
evolve prior campaigns that encourage children to eat breakfast into campaigns that emphasize
the importance of the meal’s nutritional content. Eating an unhealthy breakfastand skipping
breakfast can have similar effects .Although people who eat breakfast on a regular basis are
healthier than those who normally skip, experts remind us that our obesity epidemic began when
convenience foods became prevalent. From the middle to late 1970’s, Burger King and
McDonalds began serving breakfast in America. Soon after, convenience foods became highly
demanded. Since this time, America’s childhood obesity rate has doubled. Regardless, the

2. market for fast food breakfast continues to grow. In 2010, Subway opened 23,000 stores
nationwide.
Furthermore, many fast food advertisements and campaigns helped create a discrepancy
between prior health communication campaigns. Many people began that by just eating
breakfast, they were being healthy. Convenience food companies and fast food restaurants used
persuasive messages in their advertisements and campaigns that furthered this belief. In 2009,
McDonalds produced a commercial in which a father and son ate McDonalds’ breakfast
sandwiches before the son hits a homerun. In 2008, McDonalds produced a commercial in which
different Olympic athletes explained why it was necessary to wake up early to train and eat their
McDonalds breakfast. They used statements such as, “Before it’s too late” to promote the
convenience of the sandwich. These commercials emphasized the convenience of McDonalds
foods, while suggesting that eating their breakfast would lead to enhanced athletic performance.
Despite this unrealistic outcome, Finance Daily reports that fast food sandwich sales have risen
30 percent since 2005. This indicates that the American public was persuaded and misled by
these commercials.
In 2001, when the “Eat Breakfast: a Behavior Change Campaign” was created, cereal
brands spent $792 million on advertising their cereals. Since then, breakfast cereal brands have
created their own campaigns, such as General Mill’s Choose Your Breakfast (2005), Quaker
Oatmeal’s Amazing Mornings (2006), Kellog’s Share Your Breakfast (2011). In alignment with
the “Eat Breakfast” campaign, these campaigns highlighted the benefits of eating breakfast and
how not eating breakfast could affect your health. These cereal brands saw an opportunity with
the “Eat Breakfast” campaign to promote their product. Otherwise, they may have risked being
seen as “unhealthy”.

3. Our Campaign
Due to a lack of time in the morning, parents and children whom eat breakfast may be
tempted to eat unhealthily due to these companies’ messages about convenience and health.
Although skipping breakfast may lead to weight gain and decreased academic performance,
eating an unhealthy breakfast that is high in sugar and simple carbohydrates may cause the same
effects. The USDA states, “by eating poorly at breakfast, they set themselves up to eat poorly
throughout the day.” Therefore, instead of focusing on solely eating breakfast, our campaign will
focus on the nutritional contents of a child’s breakfast in order to decrease childhood obesity in
the United States. Our main objective is to reduce the childhood obesity rate in America on a
local scale in hopes that it can become national with time and funds.
Children are incapable of eating a healthy breakfast for many reasons, but our campaign
will focus on time, education and economic issues, the two that we deemed most prevalent in
America right now. In a study conducted by the USDA, 27 percent of Americans eat their meals
and snacks outside of their homes. Secondly, a child and parents’ lack of knowledge may prevent
a child from eating a healthy breakfast. Thirdly, as stated above, past campaigns about simply
eating breakfast may cause confusion as to what is healthy. Furthermore, advertisements for fast
and convenience foods may cause people to believe that their food is nutritious. These faulty
advertisements can cause children and parents to make unhealthy decisions, despite their attempt
to be healthy.
Target Audience
To encourage children to eat a healthy breakfast on a local scale, our campaign’s team
will focus on students and parents at SPEAs elementary to demonstrate how to make quick, tasty

4. and healthy breakfasts. North Carolina has the 11th highest obesity rate in the nation. Thirty-two
percent of children in North Carolina have a BMI range of 25-29.9. Our target audience is
students at a local, low-income school, Speas Elementary. Speas is a Title One school, which is
a program that helps low-income students have the same opportunities as other students.
According to the DPI, 87 percent of the Speas Elementary students are from low-income
households. We believe that Speas would be a good school to target because “children from
low-income households do not generally eat as well as those from high-income situations.”
(USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion) To learn more about the intended audience,
we will distribute questionnaires to all the children when the students are in their “home room”
classrooms. This will eliminate children taking the survey more than once. The questionnaire
will ask if they eat breakfast and what they eat for breakfast to give us a generalization of their
breakfast habits.
Localization
The component of localization is unique in our campaign. In America, most campaigns
that promote eating breakfast have a national focus, which disallows the target audience to feel
responsible for their actions. Large-scale campaigns make it easier for individuals to ignore
because they do not feel that the campaign is directly targeted at them. Often times, large-scale
campaigns can, also, make the campaign’s target audience believe that their behavior is normal.
These campaigns, therefore, may render behavior change, rather than promote it. Therefore, by
localizing the campaign, we can make individuals feel more responsible for their actions, as they
begin to realize that they are part of the problem. A local-scale campaign will make children
want to eat healthier out of the fear of disappointing an authoritative figure, such as a teacher,
their parents, or a campaign leader. The campaign leaders will take surveys and ask students

5. about their breakfast habits at the weekly educational session to heighten this effect.
Implementing the program on a local-scale gives the campaign team an opportunity to be more
engaged with the students. Our campaign wants to give a similar feel to that of those people who
keep food diaries for dieticians. People are more likely to make healthier decisions because they
want to impress the dietician and because the problem is highlighted causing them to feel more
responsible for their actions.
Let’s Move Campaign
Our campaign will focus on helping children in low-income areas to eat a healthy
breakfast. We will follow the steps from Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” Campaign, which
suggests that childhood obesity is the fault of the parents, schools, government and the child.
Her campaign targets parents by suggesting healthy options and recipes for them to eat at home.
She targets the school by helping them create better tasting and healthier lunches. The
government is targeted by adapting her campaign to those in food desserts. She educates
children, as well, so that they are able to make healthy choices on their own. Similar to the
“Let’s Move” campaign, we believe that the high obesity rate amongst children is a collective
due to the decisions that the schools, government, parents and child make.
1. Lack of Education and Time
In Great Britian, similar to the United States in both size and culture, “A Better
Breakfast” campaign was launched to promote healthy breakfast eating in eleven local schools.
The campaign focused on educating the children on ways to eat a healthier breakfast and
overcome the issue of time. This campaign encourages children to make breakfast the most
important meal of their day, in hopes that eating breakfast will promote calorie control and eating

6. properly throughout the day. Instead of focusing on simply eating breakfast, it encourages
children to examine what they eat and why.The campaign holds cooking demonstrations to help
teach and show how children and parents can cook and eat a healthier breakfast when time is
scarce.
We will use the framework of this campaign in our campaign to help end issues of time and
education. To educate children, we will hold weekly seminars before school that will highlight
how to eat a healthy breakfast. We will use OrganWise Guys puppets to demonstrate how
different nutrients effect different organs. The program will use the OrganWise guys as healthy
“cool” icons to help gain the students’ trust and interest and change their perception that healthy
eating is associated with being uncool. We believe that for a child to be healthy, he or she must
make a conscious decision to be healthy and also have parents that are willing to provide healthy
options for their children. Since children have to make the conscious decision to be healthy, we
have to change the perception of what “being healthy” means to a child. Since children are more
likely to think a stuffed icon is “cooler” than a teacher, who is usually symbolic of an
authoritative, uncool figure, we will use the OrganWise Guys as icons to hopefully gain
children’s trust and interest to change their perception about what “being healthy” means to our
target audience. These messages will, also, be able to grasp the attention of the audience and be
interesting enough for them to remember and use what they have learned at meal time. We will
explain why it is important to eat these different nutrients and how to obtain them. We will, also,
focus on ending the discrepancy between what breakfast foods are and are not healthy. After
each session, we will put up a poster that explains the lessons learned from that day. Every time a
child enters the gym, he or she will be reminded of that lesson and hopefully implement it into
their breakfast routine.

7. To educate parents, we will have different recipes and informational blurbs in the
school’s weekly newsletter that will make it easier for them to understand and overcome the
issue of time when preparing a healthy breakfast for their children. We will suggest that all
aspects of health are interconnected and that a child who eats a nutritious breakfast is less likely
to acquire other health problems, such as Type 2 Diabetes, which can be costly for the parents.
Since Speas is in a low-income district, it is our hope that this will encourage parents to make
sure that their children are eating a healthy breakfast to keep medical costs of the future down.
We will also write a weekly post in the school’s newsletter about easy recipes and ways to get
children to eat a healthy breakfast.
As suggested by the “Let’s Move” Campaign, schools and the government, also, play a
role in the childhood obesity epidemic. We do not believe that teachers should be responsible for
their students’ meals. Instead, we will implement vending machines that the school and
government will have to pay for. Vending machines will be stocked with healthy breakfast
options like bananas, granola bars, trail mixes, low-fat milk, and mini boxes of cereal. This
would help those that may not have access to healthy food options or do not have time to grab
breakfast before arriving at school. For those that do not have the funds for a healthy breakfast,
we would like the school to provide newer, healthier options that would be provided as free
breakfast options for students with vouchers. Furthermore, for those on reduced lunches and
breakfasts, it is our hope that we can persuade the government to make healthier and better
tasting breakfast options using the information that was included in the beginning of this paper.
Media Channels

8. Besides our poster messages, we will also haverecipe ideas in the parent newsletters for
our sub-audience, whom play a crucial role in our goal. These recipe ideas will make it easier
for parents, who otherwise may choose convenient foods for their children due to a lack of time,
energy, or desire. We understand that it is hard for parents to provide healthy options for
children, especially in the morning, when there is a huge time crunch. Our recipes, which will
all take 5 to 10 minutes each, will hopefully help parents make healthy decisions quickly and
easily for their children without having to map out nutrients and/or search for quick and healthy
options.
Since children are responsible for a large part of their diet, it is important that we make it
easy for a child to make healthy decisions. Posters will be hung so the children will be able to
recall and remember what was discussed in the lecturers. They will be able to see the posters
when they go to gym class every other day. The posters will, also, be placed by the vending
machines so that after the lectures, the students will be more tempted to make healthier breakfast
choices.
These messages relate to the theoretical basis of our campaign because we first want to
educate our audience and make them realize the difference between a healthy breakfast and just
eating breakfast. We understand that we are competing with past advertisements and campaigns
that have given the public the misconception that simply eating breakfast is healthy. However,
want to make it easy for our audience to learn how to and remember how to eat a healthy
breakfast easily.
Evaluation

9. We will evaluate our campaign by examining the children in pretests, posttests,
questionnaires, and mini-quizzes. We will evaluate these by taking the answers and comparing
them by looking in a before-and-after fashion. For the educational lecturers, it may be hard to
decipher if our lecture was a direct cause of the children’s learning or inability to learn the
material. We will have to decipher if the questions we asked were easier or if the material was
more interesting than the previous week. Also we have to look at if the teaching strategy we
used in the lecture was more effective. We will change and adapt our teaching strategies based
on the children’s scores on the mini-quizzes.
Our pre-test will test the student and parents’ perceptions of self-efficacy and food
availability. We will ask the following questions: 1. Do you eat a healthy breakfast? 2. How
often is healthy food available to you in your home? 3. Do you have enough time before school
to eat a healthy breakfast? 4. Do you think you would eat a healthy breakfast if it were available
to you?” Our answer scale would consist of the following options: 1-All the Time 2-Most of the
Time 3-I don’t know 4-Not Usually 5-Never. This will test for how many times a child eats
breakfast and how often it is healthy. It will also tell us factors that may make it hard to eat
breakfast, such as food unavailability and lack of time. Our post-test will help us test if our
campaign worked to create a behavioral change amongst the parents and students at Speas
Elementary and will consist of the same questions that were listed above.
As stated above, we will look at before-and-after results of the campaign with pre-and
post-tests. We will have to check the stock of the vending machines to see if this is an effective
and useful tool in our campaign. The vending machines should be located right outside of the
gymnasium, where the lectures will be held, to make it easier for kids to associate breakfast with

10. the lecture and remember where they are located. It will also make it easier for them to attain a
healthy breakfast right after the lecture.
To test the effectiveness of our education programs for students, students will be given a
mini-quiz after each program lecture. Monitors will walk around and make sure that the students
are not copying or talking to one another during the quizzes. The quizzes will not affect the
students’ grades in anyway, but will help us evaluate how much information they are attaining
from the program. We will collect the mini-quizzes and decipher what aspects of the program
need to be more emphasized.
The questions on the mini-quizzes will be multiple choices and ask generalized questions
from the lecture. For example, on a lecture about Vitamin C, a sample question would include:
“What breakfast item has the most vitamin C?” with the multiple choice answers: “A. Orange
Juice B. Cheerios C. Toast and Peanut Butter D. Melon”. As stated before, after reviewing all of
our materials, we will adjust our campaign to better educate and help students based on their
needs and desires.