6 FOOD DAY PRINCIPLES
Promote health by curbing junk-food marketing aimed at kids
The soaring rate of childhood obesity—tripling since 1980—has rung the warning bell for health experts and parents. With junk foods and junk-food advertising, everywhere, we should not be surprised that kids are gorging on inexpensive, tasty, and often unhealthy foods. Pizzas, burgers, fries, snack cakes, and sugary drinks. Look at those foods and you're looking at a future of ever more obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Obesity rates have increased for boys and girls, be they white, black, or Latino. The greatest prevalence of obesity is among Latino male teens and black female teens, with rates approaching 30 percent (many additional kids are merely overweight). Partly because of obesity, Dr. David S. Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston, and his colleagues said, "Obesity is such that this generation of children could be the first basically in the history of the United States to live less healthful and shorter lives than their parents."
But obesity isn't the only problem. A typical child's diet increases blood pressure, raises blood sugar levels, puts arteries on the road to heart disease, and promotes tooth decay.
The sad thing is that kids are actively encouraged to eat unhealthy foods and rarely prompted to eat healthy meals. Industry's marketing efforts include television advertising, advergaming web sites, cartoon characters on packages, and even toys included with nutritionally poor fast-food meals. Ronald McDonald is like a Pied Piper, leading kids to the Golden Arches and cultivating a taste for white bread, French fries, fatty meat, fatty cheese, and soft drinks.
Most of the foods marketed to kids are mediocre fast foods, sugary breakfast cereals, and candies. Many of them are based on white flour, sugar, fat, and salt, plus a sprinkling of artificial colorings and flavorings.
- White flour lacks much of the nutritional quality of whole wheat flour.
- Refined sugars—be they plain old white sugar or high-fructose corn syrup—promote weight gain, especially when they come from sugary drinks, such as carbonated soft drinks and fake fruit drinks. The federal government's 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that an excellent diet for a moderately active 10-year-old would include only about 80 calories per day from added sugars—that's about a half a can of soda pop. That 80 calories represents about 4 percent of the child's 1,800 calories. The average American is consuming about 16 percent of calories—or four times as much—from added sugars.
- Saturated fats—from burgers, cheese pizzas, whole or 2 percent milk—promote heart disease, even starting in childhood. Liquid vegetable oils—soy, sunflower, corn—are far more healthful than partially hydrogenated oil (artificial trans fat), animal fats, palm oil, and coconut oil.
- Salt and other sources of sodium are everywhere—mostly from the salt in bread, processed meats, and other processed foods. And salt is probably causing more harm to our health than anything else in our foods. Some children's meals from restaurants such as Red Lobster, KFC, and Burger King contain more sodium than a child should eat in an entire day. All that sodium starts raising blood pressure, even in young children.
- Food dyes, such as Red 40 and Yellow 5, impair some children's behavior and may increase the risk of cancer.
Food companies use some of the most advanced neuromarketing techniques to get inside children's developing brains and encourage them to prefer disease-promoting foods. Industry's sophisticated tactics are designed to drive high-tech wedges between parents and children, undermining parental authority and responsibility. It's high time to stop companies' exploitative marketing of junk foods to children and for government to mount major campaigns to encourage kids to eat healthy meals.
Fortunately, there's been progress, especially in schools. Some cities and states, including California, Oregon, and Kentucky, have restricted the sale of soft drinks (but sometimes allow sports drinks) and snack foods. Aided by First Lady Michelle Obama's widely publicized concerns about children's health and nutrition, Congress, in 2010, passed a law that will lead to the first-ever national nutrition standards for foods sold out of school vending machines and stores. Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is developing regulations that will improve the nutritional quality of foods in school meals.
With regard to advertising aimed at young children, most major food and beverage companies have adopted nutrition standards—of varying quality. For instance, they do not limit the amount of white flour, synthetic dyes (which trigger hyperactive behavior in some children and may promote cancer), and other questionable ingredients. The federal government is developing stronger standards. Those standards will also be voluntary, but they should carry a good deal of moral force. If companies do not adhere to those standards, long-needed mandatory standards could be the next step. One good thing about standards is that they force companies to focus on developing healthier new foods: if companies can't advertise new foods, it's very hard to sell them.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration could help kids' health greatly by banning partially hydrogenated oil (the source of artery-clogging artificial trans fat), limiting sodium in packaged foods to safe levels, and banning food dyes.
In addition to improving the quality of processed foods, much greater investment should be made to encourage children to eat healthy foods—fruits, vegetables, beans, non-fried seafood, low-fat milk and yogurt, and lean poultry in particular. Community-wide campaigns—involving teachers, parents, pediatricians, and health departments—and focusing on both diet and physical activity, can be quite successful and should be funded by federal, state, and local governments.
Helpful Resources:
Alliance for a Healthier Generation
Center for Science in the Public Interest
Centers for Disease Control
EPODE (Together Let's Prevent Childhood Obesity
Let's Move (First Lady Michelle Obama's campaign)
Robert Wood Johnson Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity
Yale Rudd Center
