Empowering Healthy Kids Blog

Patrick Basham and John Luik, co-authors of Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, responds to International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) plans to  to ban television advertising between 6am and 9pm for foods high in fat, sugar and salt; to completely ban internet and new media advertising; and to prohibit the use of celebrities or cartoon characters, competitions and free gifts to promote ‘junk food’. An excerpt:

If you peek behind the regulatory curtain, however, the claims about the causal influences of food advertising on children’s diets and weight share a central and definitive flaw in their understanding of what counts as demonstrating causality. In order to establish an evidence-based case for food advertising as a cause of childhood overweight and obesity, one would have to demonstrate that such advertising had an independent effect on children’s weight. This, in turn, would require a research study design that controlled for the multiple other risk factors (by some estimates dozens) connected with childhood obesity.

However, none of the studies purporting to demonstrate that food advertising causes childhood obesity control for more than a handful of these other risk factors. These studies therefore cannot establish an evidence-based case about the connection between food advertising and children’s weight.

If food advertising caused children’s weight gain and obesity, wouldn’t you expect to find an increase in advertising that parallels the increase in obesity? This is not the case. UK food and drink ad spending has been falling in real terms since 1999 and is now roughly at 1982 levels, even while rates of overweight and obesity have been rising. Consider, too, that in 1982 food ads constituted 34 per cent of total television advertising, whereas in 2002 they made up only 18 per cent.

Read the whole argument. My opinion is that, generally speaking, bans insult our intelligence and undermines the value of parents role in raising their children. In particular, if there is no evidence of a direct influence of junk foods ads in the increase in childhood obesity, then why bother with bans in the first place?

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