NIH Bans Junk Food Ads. Next Plan to Ban TV, Then Parents.
A new study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research and funded by the National Institutes of Health has demonstrated that banning junk food advertisements may help stem the child obesity epidemic.  The study shows that banning such ads from children’s programming will help to reduce the rate of childhood obesity by 18 % for kids 3 to 11, and 14% for adolescents 12-18. The National Institutes of Health has heralded the study as empirical evidence for policy change. Consequently, they issued a ban against fast-food advertisements aimed at children.
Since Sweden and Norway issued similar bans in the 1990’s, companies have been developing tactics to avert the same kind of censorship in the US.  Some industry leaders have signed onto the Council of Better Business Bureaus’ Childrens’ Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (link). The voluntary program posits certain guidelines for judging which foods are “healthy” enough to be advertised to children. However, the standards outlined are very lax. So much so that most junk food can still pass (link).
The data on television advertisements aimed at kids is nothing short of alarming. 49% of the advertisements are food and 91% of those foods were high in fat, added sugars, added sodium, or low in nutrients (link).  However, without demonstrative proof that kids in Sweden and Norway have lost weight since their commercial bans, there is little reason to believe there is direct correlation between the type of ads watched and childhood obesity. Occam’s Razor stipulates that the simplest explanation is more often the correct one. In this case, kids that watch a lot of television sit around on their butts all day, and kids that sit around on their butts all day will get fat. If you think it matters what sort of ads these kids watch, then you must also believe that these kids are the ones earning a paycheck and going grocery shopping. Whining is not the parental equivalent of kryptonite: Parents do not have to buy their kids the crap they see on tv.
I like it when the government steps in to help the little guy, but when the little guy is a six-year-old with rather chubby fingers parents need to do some explaining. But, it won’t matter what kids see on tv if their parents continue to feed their children unhealthy food and let them sit on their butts all day. In short, parents need to take more responsibility for their fat kids before the government does. That’s a slippery slope none of us wants to go down.
December 16, 2008
Tags: fast-food, marketing, nutrition, obesity, parents, policy Posted in: Health, Politics, Science & Technology
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