London to ban fast food near schools
First major city to push against unhealthy diet served to kids could inspire change elsewhere
McDonald’s and Pizza Hut just joined a club once reserved for smoke shops and sex stores: London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced a plan to ban them — and all fast-food joints — from opening near London schools.
Effective fall 2019, the policy would block new fastfood restaurants from setting up shop within 400 metres of primary and secondary schools. It would also require all new fast-food outlets to adhere to minimum nutrition rules.
The plan comes at a time of mounting global concern about the link between fast food and childhood obesity: The latter has reached epidemic proportions in many countries, and studies have found that salty, greasy restaurant diets are, in large part, to blame. That realization has spurred a desperate search for policy initiatives that can persuade children, and their parents, to eat more healthfully.
As the first major city to propose such a ban, London could well inspire similar policies elsewhere. “It sets a precedent,” said Ben Winig, the vice-president of law and policy at the U.S.-based non-profit ChangeLab Solutions. “As public health and planning become more intertwined, I think we’ll see more cities use zoning as a public health solution.”
According to Winig and many others in public health, the need to address childhood obesity has never been more urgent. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, about one in five 11year-olds is obese — which makes them far more likely to develop conditions such as diabetes and heart disease as adults.
Researchers have blamed the epidemic on diets rich in processed foods, which contain far too many calories, and not enough fruits and vegetables. Fast food contributes to those poor diets: One 2009 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that students who go to school within walking distance of a fastfood outlet drink more soda, eat fewer fruits and vegetables and are more likely to be overweight than students who do not.
Findings like that one have fuelled calls for policies like fast-food bans near schools, or “healthy food zones.” In the United Kingdom, the cities of Newcastle and Halston have adopted bans already, and Charlotte and Austin also have floated their own school fast-food bans.
London, however, is by far the largest city to begin a fast-food ban of this kind.
Proposed as part of a periodic city planning initiative, the policy will go into effect after a two-year comment period, according to a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.
In a statement, Khan described the measure as part of his attack on the “ticking time bomb of childhood obesity.”