A failure to limit the way the junk food industry promotes itself to young people will make life far harder for parents trying to give children a nutritious diet, according to the royal society set up to improve public health.
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Experts in child health had hoped that the government’s long-awaited plan for fighting childhood obesity would include a comprehensive commitment to rein in the power of the food industry to advertise its more unhealthy products to children.
But, while the Department of Health is understood to have been supportive of the commitment, it was omitted from the plan unveiled last week during the summer recess following intervention by No 10. The decision dismayed many in the public health sector.
The watered-down plan, nine months in the making, was seen as a major victory for the fast food and fizzy drinks industries which have lobbied vigorously against measures that would stop them advertising at key times. Originally due to be unveiled by David Cameron, the revised plan under Theresa May’s new government has been savaged by TV chef Jamie Oliver and health bodies for not going nearly far enough.
Public Health England had produced a large body of evidence that suggested tackling the way the food and drinks companies target children was vital if the plan was to have an impact. But the government’s decision to ignore the evidence represents a huge missed opportunity, according to Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), which conducted interviews with children and their parents on what needed to be done.
“Everybody was advocating very hard for a ban on advertising junk food before the watershed and for family-based programmes like The X Factor,” Cramer said. “We’ve done quite a lot of research talking to young people who tell us that this – the stuff they see online, on bus tickets on posters near their school – makes an enormous difference. People are worried about the promotions, about the advertising. It’s all about pester power – 75% of parents we spoke to said their kids had seen an ad and they’d give in after half an hour of pestering.”
Cramer described the government plan as a good one but with “some big bits missing”. Only if a range of relevant government departments were to commit to preventative measures could the mounting problem of childhood obesity be adequately tackled, she suggested.
“If you look at teen pregnancies, that was a committed, longstanding strategy that went on for 10 years and now we’ve got the outcomes that are much better than predicted. If you really mean to do something about childhood obesity you can, but you need to get all these things working at the same time.”
The failure to constrain the advertising power of the fast food industry would make the job of councils trying to fight obesity all the more difficult, Cramer said. “For a local authority trying to take action against child obesity it doesn’t make their life easier. Junk food will still be advertised everywhere. It means the fight against childhood obesity will be much harder.”
She also echoed concerns expressed by some supermarket chains that voluntary plans to reduce sugar amounts in food would fail. “If you make it mandatory then, in a competitive sense, everyone knows where they stand. If it’s voluntary then the companies who do something will feel, ‘well the other guys aren’t doing it’. It needs to be a level playing field. We’ve got to do what we did with salt. The evidence is clear: most kids who are overweight or obese get their calories from sugar-sweetened beverages.”
Nearly 10% of all four- to five-year-olds and almost 20% of 10- to 11-year-olds are obese ,according to official figures. Obesity-related health issues now cost the NHS almost £5bn a year. The RSPH reports that half of all adults are predicted to be obese by 2050, more than doubling NHS costs to £10bn a year and with wider economic costs to the nation of almost £50bn.
“If we can reduce the number of children who are obese and therefore the number of adults who are obese we will not only be saving lives but saving the NHS money,” Cramer said.
Failure to curb junk food ads ‘will hinder parents’ in fight against obesity
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