The powerful junk food lobby still faces a tough fight

CI’s Food Safety and Nutrition Programme Officer Anna Glayzer looks at the countries doing the best work in controlling food marketing to children and what it will take to motivate the rest.

Speaking at the European Network on Reducing Marketing Pressure on Children in Copenhagen last month gave me the opportunity to take stock of the efforts being made around the world to tackle junk food marketing.

Our member organisations are doing some fantastic work all over the world, most recently in Chinese Taipei, Fiji, Germany, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa and the UK.

The breadth of activity shows that, not only is the targeting of children by advertisers of high fat, salt and sugar foods an almost universal health threat, but also that consumer groups, along with other NGOs, are a vital part of efforts to protect our most vulnerable consumers.

But is our campaigning really making a difference? Is it actually pushing governments and companies to act?

A few national governments around the world are taking encouraging steps towards tighter controls on food marketing. For example, the Fijian Ministry of Health is currently drafting regulations. Also, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland has drafted a code which includes applying restrictions to advertising aired during programmes for which more than 50% of the audience is younger than 18.

This code has prompted complaints from the Irish Breakfast Cereal Association, who lamented that it would result in the banning of ads for 75% of breakfast cereals. Given the nutritional quality of many children’s cereals, I would take this as an encouraging sign.

Meanwhile, in Norway the government is developing new legal restrictions on food marketing, including the development of a rigorous new nutrient profiling model. Both the Irish code and the Norwegian legal restrictions are due to come into force on 1 January 2013.

At the international level there is also progress. The World Health Organization (WHO) has worked extensively on marketing to children. It has just published A Framework for Implementing the Set of Recommendations on the Marketing of Food and Non-alcoholic Beverages to Children.

As the title suggests, the Framework is intended to assist national governments in implementing the recommendations agreed by the World Health Assembly in 2010, in which governments were urged to act to protect children.

The WHO is also producing a manual for governments to use to develop a nutrient profiling model suitable for appliction to restrictions on marketing. Similarly, CI’s Manual on Monitoring Food Marketing is suitable for both governments and NGOs to use.

There is no shortage of tools on offer to help governments take simple, cost-effective, preventative measures on public health. The problem is that not enough governments are willing to commit to tackling non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This was borne out by last September’s much anticipated UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs, which resulted in a disappointing output. A political declaration was produced but no time-bound targets were agreed. The voluntary targets since proposed by the WHO look set to be watered down further following consultation with member states.

As Jane Landon of the UK’s National Heart Forum pointed out whilst speaking in Copenhagen, the food industry has ‘wriggle room’ when it comes to re-formulating high fat, salt and sugar food or front-of-pack labelling. It cannot, however, be expected to co-operate meaningfully with measures for which the ultimate goal is: sell less processed food.

The only really effective solution therefore is legislation. The onus, for the time being, is on national governments to be a bit more like Norway.

Less salt, more consumer information please!

As part of her work for World Salt Awareness Week, Public Health Nutritionist Clare Farrand explains the need for clear food labelling on a global scale.

We are all eating too much salt, and it’s damaging our health. Salt puts up our blood pressure, which leads to strokes and heart attacks, and is also linked to kidney disease, stomach cancer and osteoporosis. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a salt shaker, or caught a glimpse of the white stuff (people tend to hide it when I visit), but just because I don’t use it doesn’t mean I don’t have to worry about my salt intake. That’s because most of the salt that we eat (75%) is hidden in the foods that we buy. 

And I’m not just talking about the foods that taste salty; it’s in the most surprising places such as bread, breakfast cereals, soups, sandwiches, cheese, biscuits, and pastries. Of course, as a nutritionist, I am trained in the art of cracking over-complicated food labels, translating ‘sodium’ to ‘salt’, and know how much salt is high, medium or low, so I should be able to understand what is in my food. But for everyone else, how can you  choose to eat less salt?  

This is why clear food labelling is so important. If  nutrition information was presented in a consistent, easy-to-use way across all products, in all supermarkets, in all  food establishments (eg, restaurants, fast food chains, cafes, and takeaways) in all the land, then we would be able to find out what we are eating. But it is not. Even in the UK where most of the food that we buy in the supermarkets is labelled, the language on the label is often so complicated that most consumers are left confused rather than informed. 

In my opinion, the food industry has a responsibility to tell us what they are putting in our food so that we know what we are eating. In fact, not only do they have a responsibility to tell us what is in our food, they also have a moral obligation to ensure that what they do put in our food is not going to damage our health. 

What is worrying though is that if we did have clear and consistent labelling, and all of our food was shown to be high in salt, fat, and sugar, we STILL wouldn’t have a choice. 

That said, in the UK there has been lots of good work going on to tackle this issue. Many food manufacturers are now starting to gradually reduce the amount of salt in our foods; old favourites such as Kellogg’s Cornflakes and HP Sauce are much less salty than they used to be, also new brands of lower salt foods like Seabrook reduced-salt crisps and Hampstead Farms no-salt sauces are now available.

Sadly this is not  the case around the world. Salt reductions have been made in the UK due to the successful programme that has been in effect since 2005, and through the work of CI member organisation Consensus Action on Salt and Health who continually put pressure on the food industry to reduce the amount of salt they add to our food (see recent survey on pizza). 

What we really need to do now is spread this action worldwide. Many food manufacturers that sell foods in the UK are global organisations. Therefore, the reductions they have made in the UK should easily be made elsewhere. There is no reason why the UK should be so privileged! We must continue to demand less salt and call for clearer food labelling – especially in countries where there currently is none. After all, if we are to take responsibility for our own health, we at least need the information to do so. 

Until the food industry removes the excessive amounts of salt they put in our food, I will be cooking from scratch. After all, if I want to eat salt, I can always add it myself.

So this week, World Salt Awareness Week, let’s all ask for “Si’isi’iange masima”, or, “less salt please”.

Clare Farrand is a Public Health Nutritionist for the salt reduction charity, World Action on Salt and Health (WASH), a global organisation with the mission to reduce population level salt intake around the world.  

Jamie Oliver is right - we need global action on obesity

May Shelton, Project Officer at Consumers International, explains the link between food marketing to children and non-communicable diseases.

With only days left before world leaders come together for the UN high-level meeting non-communicable diseases (NCDs), global public figures from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to former UK government chief scientist Sir David King have raised issue over the shocking levels of obesity worldwide.

Consumers International's work on junk food has been focused on efforts to tackle this global pandemic for some time. And today we publish a Manual for monitoring food marketing to children, which aims to reveal the real extent of the food and beverage industries' influence on children. 

Aggressive marketing to children of products that are high in fat, sugar or salt is a contributing factor to childhood obesity, a key risk factor for NCDs. As will no doubt be heard from many sources in the run up to the summit, NCDs such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease which account for an estimated 63% of all global deaths - a truly staggering figure, not matter how many times it is repeated.

Overweight and obesity is having an immediate, negative impact on children’s health and well-being and it increases their risk of NCDs in adulthood as well. Worldwide, the IOTF estimates 170 million school-aged children are overweight or obese. In addition, the WHO estimates that 43 million pre-school children carry excess body fat.

Reducing exposure to NCD risk factors early in life is essential for the future health of children worldwide. The rate of some NCDs, such as type 2 diabetes, amongst overweight children is already on the rise globally.

One of the challenges at the UN summit will be to find the answers to reverse the trend in adult and childhood obesity. And of course the issue is a complex one; the causes of obesity are the interaction of a range of factors, including social, environmental and genetic influences. 

However, as argued in this brilliant article, one obvious driver is changes to the global food system. Such changes include an increased supply of cheap, energy-dense foods; improved distribution systems which makes such food more accessible and convenient; and the more persuasive and pervasive marketing of such food to children.

A range of studies, including several reports carried out by Consumers International, have documented that the global food and beverage industry heavily targets children; that the marketing pushed at children are mainly for products high in fat, sugar or salt or for brands that are associated with such products and the marketing techniques they use are refined to have the biggest possible impact on children (eg using celebrities or cartoon characters that attract their attention and which children like). That such marketing directly influences children’s food preferences and choices has also been irrefutably proven. Our own Lunchbox Challenge is one such compelling example. Lets face it, marketers wouldn’t spend millions ‘engaging’ with children if that wasn’t the case.

It is the responsibility of government to protect children’s health. Relying on industry to self-regulate what and how they market unhealthy products to children just isn’t cutting it and is failing to protect children as evidenced in several reports; from the UK, US, Australia and Canada.

As we get closer to the summit the action-oriented outcomes and quantified time-based targets that civil society organisations had hoped for are being watered down, under pressure, from the tobacco, food, and drinks industries that, regretfully, are increasingly invited to the table as ‘partners’ in the formulation of global public policies within the UN and its agencies. 

If leaders are looking for answers to prevent obesity and thus help to eliminate the risk of millions of children suffering from and dying from related diseases they should stop focusing on the interests of industry and follow the recommendations by the WHO or the European Network Code and introduce policies that bring about strict controls on the ability of the food and beverage industry to market unhealthy products to children and young people. 

While some developed countries have some regulation to control marketing to children, it’s a new area in many low and middle-income countries. A first step on the road to policy development is to monitor the extent to which children are exposed to food marketing and to assess the influence of food and beverage marketing to children. 

Consumers International’s Manual for monitoring food marketing to children is designed to aid governments in developing such an evidence base. The manual is a practical step-by-step guide to monitoring food marketing to children that provides clear advice on research design and planning, data collection, analysis and presenting results.

Practical tools, such as the manual, provide a small but significant contribution to understanding the extent and influence of unhealthy food advertising to children and therefore the important role that restrictions on aggressive marketing directly to children will have on reducing obesity and NCDs worldwide.