Global campaign for a Junk food advertising code
 | Cheryl, lead dietitian at EatatEase has been reading about a new global campaign that's been launched for the introduction of a voluntary code of practice that includes tight restrictions on television and internet advertising. |
Recently I’ve been hearing about the possibility of a ban on using celebrities and cartoons that target children with unhealthy foods, if the food industry can’t or isn’t willing to self regulate affectively then we do need take some steps to collectively help tackle the problem with rising levels of obesity in children.
Professor Philip James of the London-based International Obesity Task Force, said: "It is vital that, as well as governments, food industry leaders support the new standards we propose.”
"We challenge the giants of the food and beverage industry to throw their weight behind this and demonstrate they really do want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem."
(Source: The Times)
In January the UK television regulator (Ofcom) introduced a ban on marketing unhealthy foods in adverts during shows aimed at children. However we’ll certainly need to go a lot further before we start to have any real impact, the World Health Organization has predicted that 2.3 billion people over 15 years old will be overweight by 2015.
Obviously advertising regulation alone is not the solution to Obesity... but it will certainly help. As so many of us will already know children can be very persuasive when it comes to food shopping. They’ll understandably want to eat or drink the food their hero is eating on TV, and unfortunately the foods that they generally promote are junk foods. We need to see more encouragement of healthier foods in the media, seeing more of likes of Popeye and Banana-man wouldn’t be a bad thing.
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