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Sugary Drinks are Rotten for Teeth
Have you seen any particularly vivid tooth decay outside of your clinic recently? The Australian Dental Association WA has again joined forces with Cancer Council WA to relaunch and refresh the LiveLighter® ‘Sugary Drinks Are Rotten For Teeth’ campaign, which focuses on the damage sugary drinks do to teeth. The advertising campaign is running for six weeks until Sunday, December 18, 2021, to coincide with the inevitable summer slushie and sugary-drink marketing onslaught.
The original campaign, entitled ‘Sugary Drinks Are A Rotten Choice’, first ran in January and February 2020, with adverts appearing throughout WA. The new campaign will again be shown in metro and regional areas around the State, including out-of-home sites via buses billboards, and bus stops, as well as online ads on social media. The major aims of the campaign are to discourage the purchase of sugary drinks and to encourage people to drink water instead. Parents of school-aged children are the primary target audience as they are likely to be the main grocery buyer for their household and have a significant influence on the consumption habits of their family. The LiveLighter® campaign is delivered by Cancer Council WA and funded by WA Department of Health. The campaign has been raising awareness of the health risks associated with drinking sugary drinks since it first launched in 2012. This includes airing a series of television commercials linking the consumption of these products with weight gain, and raising awareness of the associated increase in risk of developing chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
The dental-health message is a relatively new focus for LiveLighter®, and builds on the public’s awareness of the harm caused by sugary drinks by focussing on the medium-term consequence of tooth decay. This is an important angle which historically has not been harnessed in LiveLighter® mass media advertising. ADAWA has been the expert voice in the development of this campaign, consulting on the creative executions and providing evidence-based advice.
Sugary drinks are the single biggest contributor of added sugar to Australians’ diets. Products like soft drinks are readily available, heavily promoted, and discounted to entice people to purchase them. Sustained efforts from like-minded public health organisations are required to counter these marketing tactics to level the playing field for consumers and ratchet up the pressure on governments to act in the interest of the health and wellbeing of the community. ADAWA and Cancer Council WA, along with nine other leading WA health agencies, recently issued a joint statement calling on the State Government to ban advertising of unhealthy food and drinks on stateowned assets, such as those on public transport infrastructure like buses, trains and train stations. This group is also advocating for the introduction of other regulatory measures to protect children and families from junk food marketing, including removing unhealthy sponsorship of sports and restricting this form of marketing when and where it is likely to be seen by kids. ADAWA and Cancer Council WA expect ‘Sugary Drinks Are Rotten For Teeth’ to spark further conversation around the detrimental effects of sugary drinks in Western Australians’ diets, and encourages dentists to reinforce a strong preventative health message to their patients. In short, avoid sugary drinks and drink water instead. Further information about the campaign as well as tools to use in your practice can be accessed on the LiveLighter® website and social media platforms.
