In April, the Federal Trade Commission
released the “Preliminary Proposed Nutrition Principles,” a
suggested food marketing guideline that is meant to steer the food industry
towards greater self-regulation of marketing campaigns directed at
children.
Principle A states: Foods marketed to
children must make a meaningful contribution to healthful diets, and
contain at least one of these food groups: fruit; vegetable; whole
grain; fat-free or low-fat milk products; fish; extra-lean meat or
protein; eggs; nuts and seeds; beans. Principle B states that
marketing to children should seek to minimize the consumption of
foods that could have a negative impact on health or weight,
specifically sodium, saturated fat, trans fat and added sugars.
Much of the concern about the marketing
techniques used by the food industry stems from the widespread and
often unsupervised access children have to media these days,
particularly the Internet. Companies are now using online games, cell
phone applications and social media websites like Facebook to market
their products covertly.
Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at
Harvard Medical School and a director for the Campaign for a
Commercial-Free Childhood, explains “Food marketers have tried to
reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve
never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass
parents so successfully.” (The New York Times, April 20) According
to the FTC, over $2 billion was spent on marketing food products to
children and adolescents in 2006. (The New York Times, April 28)
According the Center for Disease
Control, childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30
years, and “approximately 17% of children and adolescents aged 2-19
are obese.” Children who are overweight or obese are more than
likely to remain overweight or obese into adulthood, putting them at
risk for a host of ailments including heart disease, type-2 diabetes
and cancer.
With the well-known health risk of
foods like sugary cereals, soft drinks and prepackaged meal items
(for example, Lunchables, Chef Boyardee) create, it is absolutely
clear that regulating how these items are marketed to children is
imperative.
The FTC’s proposed guidelines
fall far short of a solution
to a growing health crisis being manufactured by the food industry. The FTC has given companies five to 10 years to bring their
marketing into compliance—enough time for today’s children to become diabetic adults. Not only that, they have made the guidelines completely
voluntary.
If there is a health crisis among children, why is there no emergency response calling for much stricter and mandatory guidelines to be imposed immediately? What other consideration is the FTC weighing in when regulating a practice that endangers children’s lives?
The answer is profit.
It is ludicrous to think that an
industry that makes billions of dollars every year by strategically
targeting unhealthy foods towards children would ever voluntarily
come into compliance with a guideline that would increase their cost
of production and reduce their marketing power and sales. But it is also clear that the FTC, an agency whose appointees and funding are controlled by politicians in the pockets of corporations, can hardly serve as a watchdog to protect consumers from harm.
The guidelines set
forth by the FTC are little more than a smokescreen in response to the
growing concern raised by health specialists and parents. By imposing a
relatively minor burden on the food industry, the FTC is creating the
illusion that the agency’s motives are something other than to protect
industry, while the health crisis continues to grow.
Companies like General Mills, Nestle
and Kraft have known for decades that their products are extremely
detrimental to the health of their customers, and yet they have gone
out of their way to make sure these products not only stay on the
shelves but are consumed in mass quantities, particularly by
children. The food industry has even gone so far as to ensure that
their young customer base has unrestricted access to such products by
signing deals with school districts and school lunch suppliers.
Much like the end of Joe Camel and the
restrictions on cigarette advertising, the food industry cannot be
trusted to regulate itself and must have mandatory guidelines it is
forced to comply with. The
for-profit capitalist food industry will never take action to improve
the health and livelihood of its consumers, and regulators will not make bold moves out of their own initiative. Only when people stand up
and demand accountability will we see a true improvement in the
quality of our food, health and lives.
