Obesity, and particularly childhood obesity, is considered an epidemic by the WHO because of the health problems it causes and its impact on the lives and environment of those who suffer from it. In this article, the term “obesogenic features” refers to the set of supposedly aggravating risk factors that could intensify the proven effect on minors of exposure to food-related media content. The article explores the characteristics of food-related content in YouTube videos aimed at children, with the objective of identifying videos that pose a high risk due to the presence of obesogenic arguments, as well as videos with innovative media trends. It presents an exploratory study of 293 videos (22 hr 41 min) aimed at children and containing food and/or food brands, posted from May 2020 to April 2021 on 28 YouTube channels of food brands and child YouTubers with the largest numbers of subscribers. Child YouTubers often appear to explicitly promote calorie intake as a diet alternative and to disseminate content in which the presence of low-nutrition foods undermines childhood obesity prevention policies. The sensitivity of this target audience and the highly emotional nature of the formats in which messages with obesogenic features appear, such as “challenges,” point to an urgent need to adopt ethical standards and legal measures to regulate such content.

中文翻译：

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YouTube 上针对儿童的食品相关内容的致肥胖特征

肥胖，特别是儿童肥胖，被世界卫生组织认为是一种流行病，因为它引起的健康问题及其对患者生活和环境的影响。在本文中，术语“致肥胖特征”是指一组假定的加重风险因素，这些因素可能会加剧暴露于与食品相关的媒体内容对未成年人的已证实影响。本文探讨了针对儿童的 YouTube 视频中与食物相关的内容的特征，目的是识别由于存在肥胖论据而构成高风险的视频，以及具有创新媒体趋势的视频。它对 293 个视频（22 小时 41 分钟）进行了探索性研究，针对儿童并包含食品和/或食品品牌，于 2020 年 5 月至 2021 年 4 月发布在 28 个 YouTube 频道的食品品牌和订阅人数最多的儿童 YouTube 上。儿童 YouTube 主播似乎经常明确宣传将卡路里摄入作为一种饮食替代品，并传播低营养食品的存在破坏儿童肥胖预防政策的内容。该目标受众的敏感性以及具有肥胖特征的消息出现的格式（例如“挑战”）的高度情绪化，表明迫切需要采用道德标准和法律措施来规范此类内容。