Fast Food Bans Popping Up in London, Maybe New York
Waltham Forest, a neighborhood in London, has banned the construction and establishment of fast food restaurants within 400 meters of a school. Whereas a little over 1 in 10 children in the borough are overweight, an overwhelming majority (93 percent!) of the residents approved of the measure, intended curb childhood obesity (link).
The measure has also the support of Children’s Secretary Ed Balls, who said there was no point in prohibiting junk food in schools if students could buy it from nearby dining establishments
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In justifying the ban, Clyde Loakes, leader of the borough council, told Guardian Unlimited, “We don’t want to tell people how to live their lives – but at the moment residents simple don’t have enough choice because of the amount of fast food takeaways.”
How effective will this ban be? It prohibits only the creation of fast food joints, rather than abolishing existing ones. If fast food is a major cause of obesity, why not try to get rid of all of them?
Also, (ignoring the logical difficulty of arguing that taking away options gives one more choices) taking away fast food joints does not automatically mean that produce markets will appear in their stead. They aren’t lobbying for more appealing and healthier meals to be served at the school. In 2005, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver lead a campaign to get just that (link). They don’t come out and say he failed, but…:
The resulting “Jamie’s School Dinners” program saw him struggle to persuade children to try dishes other than chips, burgers and some other unhealthy foods.
Furthermore, if the school lunch options are “chips, burgers, and some other unhealthy foods”, what is the commotion over kids eating at fast-food joints? Obviously, there is change needed and it’s needed at all levels of the system. In my opinion, this ban on new fast food restaurants will do nothing to diminish the growing child obesity problem without concurrent system-wide improvements to the access and availability of cheap, healthy, tasty foods.
Think it’s only happening in London? Yes, London has increasingly created laws that impinge on the American ideal of privacy and individual freedoms. But, watch out. A study done by researchers from the University of California at Berkley and Colombia University is causing some New York City Council members to think about a ban in their own backyard (link). The study found that students within walking distance (defined as 1/10 of a mile) were five times more likely to be obese than kids at schools farther away from the restaurants.
Last year a district in Los Angeles unanimously approved of a similar ban on new fast food restaurants (link). The difference between that and London’s legislation is the fact that the council actively encouraged supermarkets and farmers markets to build in the area. They are actually trying to make eating healthy an easy option. The Londoners, on the other hand, were fighting against “the litter, noise and anti-social behavior relating to fast-food restaurants in [the] borough”. Â What exactly are their priorities here?
Will banning new fast food restaurants near schools actually curb chilldhood obesity?
April 22, 2009
Tags: change, fast-food, McDonald's, nutrition, obesity, policy Posted in: Health, Politics, Science & Technology
2 Responses
so the solution is to not enforce health education and discipline in children?…great….lets show them we can always take the ez way out!
I know, wouldn’t it make sense to actually talk to the kids about what they are eating instead of just taking the bad stuff away?
Also, why isn’t anyone making more of an effort to change the meals available at school? If they were more attractive, then maybe fewer children would feel like going off campus. There is a school in California that’s actually put together a panel of kids to find out what would get them to eat the school lunch. Last I heard, that program was actually getting healthier foods into the school and, more importantly, getting kids to eat it.
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