ABSTRACT

There is increasing shift in dietary consumption and energy expenditure that coincides with economic, demographic, and epidemiological changes. Currently developing countries are transiting from traditional diets high in cereal and fiber to more Western pattern diets high in sugars, fat, and animal-source food. Thus, resulting to the study of Ultra-processed food and beverage advertisement on Channels Television Station. A content analysis employed the International Network for Food and Obesity/Non-Communicable Diseases Research, Monitoring and Action Support (INFORMAS) protocol to identify food and beverage marketing on Channels Television. Adverts were collected for eight consecutive days, three weekend days and 5 weekdays with the use of a Television, a back-up device, and an enabling decoder. The research was carried out at Gado Hotels and Suites, Umuahia Abia State. A total of 66 adverts was collected and was recorded from 06:00 to 24:00hours.All television advertisements (ads) were analyzed, and food related adverts were classified according to the NOVA classification system. Descriptive analyses were used to describe the number, type of adverts, the food categories and the distribution of adverts throughout the day and time of the day. While inferential statistics (cross tabulation and chi-square tests) was used to reflect the time difference between various categories of advertisements. Results reported that a total of 66 adverts were collected (11 out of 66) of the adverts were food/drink related (16.7%).Most of the adverts shown were alcoholic beverages (63.6%),an insignificant proportion of sugar sweetened drinks (9.1%) and a quarter of healthy snack (27.3%)adverts was shown. Most of the adverts (63.7%) not permitted to be marketed to children by WHO was showed. Therefore, this study provide a baseline to advocate for effective regulations against the exposure to unhealthy food advertising, as well as actions to promote consumers’ empowerment (i.e., sharing data related to this issue in public schools, health centres and all kinds of media) to identify and combat unhealthy food advertising.