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U.S. children and adolescents see thousands of food marketing messages on digital media platforms each year, according to new research published in JAMA Pediatrics. And 92% of the marketed food and beverage products are considered unhealthy.

The study, led by Lisa Powell, director of the Food Policy Research Program at the University of Illinois Chicago, used screen recordings to examine the food marketing that children and adolescents encountered while using their smartphones and tablets. Researchers recorded 1,011 youths ages 8 to 17 while they used their devices as they normally would for leisure activities during a 30-minute session.

"This approach provides a real-world picture of young people's exposure across digital platforms, including social media, web browsing and mobile games," Powell said. "It is the first U.S. real-time screen capture study, to our knowledge, to examine youth exposure to food marketing across digital media platforms and the largest globally to date. Learning more about how children and teens experience food marketing on their devices can help inform the need for policies that can protect youths from marketing of unhealthy products."

Based on participants' reported daily leisure-time screen use, the researchers estimated that, on average, each American youth sees 3,883 food marketing exposures on digital media per year. Food marketing exposure rose substantially with age: The study found 1,427 annual food marketing exposures among children ages 8 to 12, and 10,107 annual exposures for adolescents ages 13 to 17.

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