Following up on previous posts, here’s an editorial from the good people at Scientific American, who see a strong similarity between contemporary marketing of fatty foods and the misdeeds of the tobacco industry. More below the fold.
Underage, Overweight: The Federal Government Needs to Halt the Marketing of Unhealthy Foods to Kids
By The Editors
Scientific American Magazine –
April 29, 2010
The statistic is hard to swallow: in the U.S., nearly one in three children under the age of 18 is overweight or obese, making being overweight the most common childhood medical condition. These youngsters are likely to become heavy adults, putting them at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other chronic ailments. In February, First Lady Michelle Obama announced a campaign to fight childhood obesity. Helping parents and schools to instill healthier habits in kids is an important strategy in this battle. But the government must take further steps to solve the problem.
In an ideal world, adults would teach children how to eat healthily and would lead by example. But in reality, two thirds of U.S. adults are themselves overweight or obese. Moreover, the food and beverage industry markets sugar- and fat-laden goods to kids directly-through commercials on television, product placement in movies and video games, and other media.
Its considerable efforts-nearly $1.7 billion worth in 2007-have met with sickening success: a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that children who see more television ads tend to become fatter. You might expect that watching TV, being a sedentary activity, is responsible for obesity, but the study found that obesity is correlated not with television per se but with advertising. The more commercial programming children watched, the fatter they got compared with those who watched a comparable amount of public television or DVDs. The majority of products marketed during children’s programming are foods.
As nutritionist Marion Nestle of New York University has written, society needs to “create a food environment that makes it easier for parents and everyone else to make better food choices.” Protecting children from junk-food marketing would help create conditions conducive to achieving a healthy weight.
Unfortunately, like the tobacco industry before it, the food industry cannot be trusted to self-regulate in this regard. In a study published in the March Pediatrics, investigators looked at the prevalence of food and beverage brands in movies released between
1996 and 2005. They noted, for instance, that although Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have pledged to not advertise during children’s television programming, their products routinely appear in movies aimed at kids.
Likewise, in the March Public Health Nutrition, researchers reported a 78 percent increase from 2006 to
2008 in the use of cartoon characters, toys and other child-oriented cross promotions on food packaging-much of it for nutritionally bereft foods. A whopping 65 percent of these cross promotions came from food manufacturers that have opted into the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, sponsored by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which promises to limit advertising to kids but allows participants to decide for themselves whether to restrict in-store marketing. Such examples of ineffectual commitments on the part of the food industry abound.
In December a group of U.S. agencies-the Federal Trade Commission, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture-proposed standards for foods and beverages that are marketed to children between the ages of two and 17. The agencies sensibly recommended that such foods must provide a meaningful contribution to a healthy diet by meeting specified requirements; that the amounts of saturated fat, trans fat, sugar and salt in these foods must not exceed limits set by the group; and that certain clearly healthy foods-such as those that are 100 percent fruits, vegetables or whole grains-may be marketed to kids without meeting the other two standards.
The interagency working group is due to submit a report containing its final recommendations to Congress by July 15. The standards are worthy but have one problem:
as they stand, they would be voluntary. They should be mandatory, not optional, and the FDA should implement and enforce them.
The estimated cost of treating obesity-related ailments in adults was $147 billion for 2009. With the health care system already faltering, allowing companies to decide for themselves whether to peddle junk food to kids is a fox-and-henhouse policy this country simply cannot afford any longer.