Ew, Marmite
To continue our conversation about banning junk food advertising… why didn’t anyone mention that the UK already does it? Apparently–and I know this is going to come as a huge shock–when the government starts regulating things, it can get slightly ridiculous.
The broadcasting side of Ofcom has tried to regulate food advertising to children and has relied on a formulistic approach to defining “junk food”. As a result, cheese advertising is forbidden during children’s programming, but Diet Coke is OK. The formula assumes 100g (3.5 oz.) servings of any product or condiment and as a result ketchup and Marmite (UK’s answer to peanut butter) can’t be advertised since 100g of each is is not healthy, even though the usual serving is less.
I am here to tell you, Humboldt Fog is not junk food, my friends. It’s just not. So, just for the sake of argument, if you’re banning junk food advertising to kids, what would your law be?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Advertising, International, Kids
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Wow – not sure how I feel about this ban, but I certainly have feelings about its interpretation and application. My law would be to spend five minutes revising the formula so that it is a more informed proportion, which would land Diet Coke in around #1 of the forbiddens. Seriously – it must be a pretty unclever formula if Diet Coke can pass and cheese cannot: the formula must just look at how much bad a food can do (how much fat, how many calories, how much salt – who knows) and not what a food actually offers (i.e. nothing, in the case of Diet Coke, unless you haven’t had the RDA of caramel color today). Hey Ofcom – work out the proportion of what 100g of a food offers a body versus what it doesn’t. For crying out loud. Diet Coke. To their credit, though – that’s not junk food – that’s just junk. So.
Sorry to Diet Coke lovers out there :)
I don’t think the issue is so much that of government, but more that of the inherent difficulty of categorization. It seems to me like the best way to handle it would be to set a formula similar to what’s been done in Britain (and if you’re concerned about the health risks of diet soda, you could add caffeine to the mix), but then have some sort of appeals process in place with human beings with some training in nutrition on the panel.
I think basing the criteria on what a food has to offer nutritionally is not such a great idea. It is easy for manufacturers to add nutrients to any processed junk food and call it beneficial to health (check out the children’s breakfast cereal aisle for ample evidence of this), but there’s nothing to suggest that these nutrients are actually absorbed by the body or that they outweigh the sugar/fat/salt content of the food itself.
Good point – though with some cleverness, even salutary food additives (I guess mostly vitamins and minerals) could be given a modified value in the positive calculation – and all that other stuff (sugar/fat/salt) would figure huge in the negative. Though I doubt I’ll ever be convinced that natural fats and sugars are a bad thing.
Heh – and here I thought caffeine was about the only thing Diet Coke had going for it. :)
Any and all processed food. Leaving only fruits & veggies, maybe “natural” peanut butter.
If you wanted to go that route, D, (which isn’t a bad idea) you could just put a blanket ban on TV food advertising, because it’s pretty much only the manufacturers of processed foods who make enough money off their product to buy ads on television anyway. You could make an exception for those industry advocacy ads, like the Milk Processors and the Citrus Growers.
It is easy for manufacturers to add nutrients to any processed junk food and call it beneficial to health (check out the children’s breakfast cereal aisle for ample evidence of this), but there’s nothing to suggest that these nutrients are actually absorbed by the body or that they outweigh the sugar/fat/salt content of the food itself.
I think this is the biggest problem—the fact that food companies deliberately mislead consumers by giving products a “health halo” based on adding ingredients that may not have any actual health benefit. And a badly conceived advertising ban would probably encourage companies to pull even more crap like that in order to get around the ban, marketing candy as “fortifed power bars” and so on.
So I guess my law would involve a disclaimer on all packaging and advertising—a line or two that says “The nutritional benefits of calcium in this product have not been proven,” or something like that.
My question would be first, why are we advertising food to children. Certainly, there will be food advertisements that children see, but why have any that are during children’s programming. There are better ways of educating children about healthy food choices than having corporations who buy advertising do it for us.
They should put this healthy vending machine in schools. Parents can log on and view what their children are buying from the Vending machine. But it won’t do a lot of good deal if there are still fast food joints in the vicinity of schools.
“Each handcrafted wheel features a ribbon of edible vegetable ash along its center”. Humboldt Fog can’t be junk food if it has VEGETABLES in it, can it?? (That page looks amazing, by the way, now I want everything. You just ADVERTISED!)
I agree with D (no relation), if you’re going to ban “junk” food advertising, you need to ban all processed food advertising. I can’t think of another measure that wouldn’t leave openings for abuse.
The government is banning ‘junk food’ advertising on children’s TV. Most other countries in Europe don’t have it.
The term ‘junk food’ is itself junk and riddled with snobbery, everyone thinks it’s clever to say a burger is junk, ‘cos of its fat content and yet pate de fois gras (duck liver pate) is 80% fat, is it junk? nah, ‘cos its classy.
But wriggles, the low cost of “junk” food is exactly what makes it so problematic as a public health issue. Foie gras is expensive and traditionally served in small portions as a small part of a complete meal. Burgers and fries are cheap, which means you can afford to eat a lot of them, which has meant that the fast food industry (and other junk food purveyors) has sought bigger profits by encouraging people to eat more food. Which brings us back again to how advertising and marketing has become such a destructive force in shaping people’s eating habits.
D’you suppose this is why they started marketing Diet Coke Plus?
I can see the point of the processed foods logic, but I still think that banning certain types of food advertising is problematic. There’s plenty of evidence that eating too much red meat leads to high cholesterol and heart disease, but steak isn’t a processed food, per se. (Although you can argue that there’s a lot of processing going on between the cow in the field and the steak on the plate, but that’s another discussion.) Do you ban all the “Beef: it’s what’s for dinner” advertising?
As far as misleading claims go, not only processed foods do this. Milk, even 2% milk, is relatively high in fat as a percentage of total calories, and yet the 2% in the name makes it sound like it’s a low-fat product. Extremely misleading.
I agree that there would be some value in not advertising food products at all during children’s programming, but letting the government come up with guidelines as to what is “junk” and what is not will inevitably lead to regulatory stupidity and food companies doing weaselly things to get around same.
Increasing awareness of the gross stuff in a lot of processed foods (like high fructose corn syrup) might go a long way toward making people look at what’s in their food and increasing the demand for healthier food production. We see it happening with trans fats already, and plenty of “junk foods” are not eliminating the trans fats. I’m sure they are replacing them with something else that’s unhealthy, but if it’s not some chemical, evil additive, then it’s a start.
oops, I meant to say “plenty of junk foods are NOW eliminating the trans fats,” not that they are NOT eliminating them. Although I’m sure plenty aren’t too, but you see what I meant, right?
My concern is more about school lunch programs than anything else. Make sure there is no pop and crap at school. Teach nutrition in health and home ec.