community that has many restaurants offering high-calorie foods at low prices (Figure 1.8). These restaurants offer few fruits, vegetables, and reduced-fat dairy products and sell mostly fried or sugary foods. Like food deserts, it is difficult to eat a healthy diet in food swamps. Sometimes a community is a food desert and a food swamp—they have no large supermarkets and many fast-food restaurants. Having a good knowledge of healthy eating can help people living in food deserts or food swamps make the best decisions possible. Enrolling in nutrition education programs helps everyone build knowledge of healthy eating. Government and business projects that invest in building supermarkets can improve the availability of healthy food in areas lacking easy access to an array of healthy foods. Food Marketing Food marketing is also part of the environment. It can strongly affect your appetite. Have you ever wanted a big, juicy burger after seeing it advertised on TV? It is important to be aware of food marketing and think about how it might affect your choices. Food marketing is any type of action that a company takes to persuade you to buy their food. Advertising is one type of food marketing. The purpose of food marketing is to tell you about a product so that you will buy it. Food marketers try to make it hard for you to resist their food. They may show pictures of people having fun when they eat the food. They may tell you that the food is easy to make or that it tastes good. Sometimes, they will tell you that the food is a healthy choice (Figure 1.9). Food marketing seems to be everywhere. For instance, foods are often advertised on TV and the Internet. The average teen sees thousands of ads for foods each year! Another type of marketing that you might see in movies and TV shows is called product placement. Product placement is when food marketers pay TV and movie producers to put a product in their show. They might place the product in the scene so viewers can see it. They often get the actors to eat the food. When you see a famous person eating a certain brand of food, you may want to eat it, too. Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com Figure 1.8 Neighborhoods near food swamps are more likely to have higher rates of overweight and obesity. Keith Homan/Shutterstock.com Figure 1.9 Advertisers highlight the healthy aspects of their product to affect your food choices. How many ways does this packaging advertise this product as healthy? 15 Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. Chapter 1 Food, Nutrition, and You