TOUGH legislation is urgently needed to confront junk food marketing to children – as poor eating habits are putting thousands of kids’ lives at risk.
The Irish Heart Foundation is calling for the extension of a TV ban on unhealthy food and drink ads to 9pm.
Ireland already restricts advertising of junk food and drink– but only on broadcast children’s programmes up to 6pm.
As part of ‘Stop Targeting Kids’ drive, health campaigners from the charity are urging the Government to follow the UK and legislate to protect the next generation from diet-related disease.
Here CHRIS MACEY, Director of Advocacy, Irish Heart Foundation, explains why we need to do all we can to give our children the best start.
BEFORE the Covid pandemic, State-funded research estimated that 85,000 of this generation of children in Ireland will die prematurely due to overweight and obesity.
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We had evidence of children as young as eight presenting with high blood pressure in large numbers and teenagers with a cardiovascular age into the 60s.
The high rate of childhood obesity was a crisis then, but it could be a catastrophe now. After Covid struck, consumption of unhealthy food rose sharply, whilst physical activity levels plummeted.
Young people also spent vastly more time on social media, with a corresponding upsurge in junk food marketing directed at them.
We don’t yet know the full impact of the last two years on children’s health in Ireland. But statistics emerging from the UK suggest it has been horrific.
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England’s National Child Measurement programme found a 21 per cent increase in obesity levels among 10-11 year-olds in the 2020-21 school year.
Experts believe the situation is broadly similar here.
This is not an inevitable consequence of Covid, but of the State’s failure to tackle childhood obesity and specifically to protect children constantly pestered by online marketing behind their parents’ backs.
It’s now over four years since the Department of Health launched its voluntary code covering online junk food marketing.
We said then it was too weak to work because food companies weren’t obliged to sign up. Even if they did there were no penalties for breaking the rules.
The reality is even worse. A key commitment to set up a monitoring and complaints mechanism wasn’t met.
ACTION NEEDED
So a façade of regulation has been created when children are completely unprotected from a daily and intensifying bombardment of junk food marketing.
Two years ago a commitment was given in the Programme for Government to introduce a Public Health (Obesity) Bill, including restrictions on promotion and advertising aimed at children. But there has been no progress.
As we emerge from the pandemic, children’s dietary health has been pushed back down the agenda of national health priorities by what are deemed to be more pressing issues.
But what could be more important than the biggest known threat to the health of our children – a threat some say will mean they’ll be the first generation to be buried by their parents?
On the positive side, politicians of all parties on a powerful Oireachtas Committee recently sought inclusion of a junk food marketing ban in a new Bill on online safety.
SUPPORT FOR CHANGE
This was the third different Oireachtas Committee to unanimously seek such restrictions.
We also know from research published this week that four out of five people in Ireland support an online ban and an extension of restrictions on TV to a 9pm watershed.
So the vast majority of the public want action. And TDs and Senators across the political divide do also.
Don’t the terms and conditions of democracy dictate that in those circumstances action is taken?
Solving the obesity crisis requires a complex response involving many different remedies from no fry zones to reducing sugar and fat content of various food products.
But nothing will work until we stop marketers distorting children’s food choices, making overconsumption of high fat sugar and salt products inevitable.
Just like the reduction in our teen smoking rate from 41 per cent to 12 per cent in the last two decades would have been impossible if cigarette advertising was still allowed.
Drastic action is needed to save our children’s futures.
The first step to their salvation is protection through legislation from cynical marketing tactics that are setting so many of our young people on a path to lives dominated by chronic disease and premature death.