PressEthic

Government interventions in junk food advertising have been somewhat of a theme in the news recently, with three different countries offering three different approaches to the problem.

In the U.S., the industry-led Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative was introduced with the backing of some of the largest fast food companies, including Kellogg, McDonald’s, Cadbury and Coca-Cola. The result, according to Reuters, was a set of guidelines written to “voluntarily tighten standards and impose new requirements on advertising to kids on television and in video games.”

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit lobbying group, has strongly criticized the lack of government regulation in the move, claiming that:

these voluntary measures are “promulgated by advertising- and food-industry groups whose main goals are to forestall serious government action and to generally make life easier for advertisers.”

“Unfortunately the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are also more oriented to protecting business than helping parents and protecting children,” it said.

The CSPI pointed to recent regulation across the Atlantic as a better effort to seriously address grave obesity concerns.

Indeed, the British government recently introduced regulations on children’s advertising which, according to the Financial Times, would make it the first government to explicitly target foods with high fat, sugar and salt content.

Ofcom, the country’s media regulator, unveiled proposals that would target youth-orientated and adult programming as well as children’s shows and channels. It also wants to ensure the “protection of the under-16s as opposed to the under-nines as first proposed.”

And as CSPI suggested above, the costs of such regulation can be significant:

Ofcom estimated the impact on total broadcast revenues would be up to $73m a year. Children’s and youth-orientated cable and satellite channels could lose up to 8.8 per cent of their revenues, with the figure rising to 15 per cent in the case of dedicated children’s channels.

An even stronger approach, however, has come from the Spanish government, which recently placed a total ban on a Burger King advertisement for the 820 calorie “Whopper XXL”, due to concerns over Spain's obesity rate, which, according to another article in the FT, has doubled in the past ten years.

As the FT points out, this move comes as one of a number of government interventions taken to improve the health of its population:

Over the past year, the government has raised cigarette taxes, introduced smoking bans, launched an obesity campaign and established a black-points system for bad driving. It has even called on restaurateurs to refrain from offering the customary free nightcap at the end of meals.

When it comes to the influence of fast food advertising on the population's health, it seems that the U.S. government is happy to leave it up to the industry, the British government intervenes mainly to protect the young, while the Spanish government has taken what some have called a "nanny-state" decision on behalf of all Spaniards, young or old.

With obesity rates rising at such a drastic rate in all three countries, it seems to me that some form of government intervention is necessary to control our exposure to fast food advertising. The question is: how much, and at what age, do we need to be nannied?