They want to legislate kids thin!

I just received email from the British Heart Foundation informing me about their latest petition. They want the government to ban any form of junk food advertising to kids, and so they set up their little campaign.



To be honest, TV advertising has already been banned, but digital advertising (i.e. banners, websites, online games, etc…) hasn’t yet, so that’s what they are trying to accomplish.

Stories like this one (and this other one) find me very skeptical. I wonder:

1) Why do people attribute so much power to marketing and advertising?
The issue here is that UK children are fed an incredible amount of unhealthy food. As a result they grow up obese, and are likely to develop diseases in their adulthood, dying young and costing the NHS a lot of money. It is much more than advertising: it involves the (poor) food culture of a nation, parent’s lack of time to prepare good food, cost pressures leading school canteens to serve junk food instead of healthy vegetables, AND marketing. So to say that kids are unhealthy because of their exposure to advertising is stretching it a bit.

2) Why do people think that we can legislate the problem away?
Of all the causes underlying poor eating habits, I believe culture is the main one. Italy, my home country, is a good example: we are exposed to the same amount of junk food marketing as the UK, yet our eating tends to be a lot healthier. I believe it comes down to the fact that Italian kids grow up with their mum routinely cooking home food every day. That way we develop a better concept of what is healthy, and we learn how to cook ourselves from a very young age. This is not written in any law, so I believe that legislating food marketing will not solve the problem in the UK.

Nonetheless, healthy eating and healthy living are definitely a big topic out there at the moment, at least in the UK.

Some campaigning -like Jamie Oliver’s for example (here and here) - is in my opinion well done, because it is fundamentally attempting to use media to seed a better food culture into the nation, as well as putting pressure on the industry to adopt a more responsible approach to such issues. My hope is that good businesses will recognise this trend towards health, and will start adapting their offering to a changing consumer demand.

However, some other campaigning, like BHFs, is in my opinion purely provocative and aimed only at the most apparent aspects of the matter: marketing and advertising.
It might get some more marketing activity banned, but I doubt it will help children grow healthier.

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UPDATE 24/01: kind of relevant: http://www.brandrepublic.com/Campaign/News/778867/Govt-industry-plot-75m-ad-drive/