Govt urged to step in on kids’ food ads

Health experts’ advice to industry review panel has been ignored, says academic

The Government must step in to curb the marketing of unhealthy food to children and young people, argues a leading public health researcher. The call by the University of Auckland’s Professor Boyd Swinburn, sounded in the New Zealand Medical Journal today, comes as researchers say sophisticated marketing methods, such as cookies and advertlinked gaming, are being used by food websites to target children.

Swinburn has claimed a submission by 77 New Zealand health professors to a recent industry review of self-regulatory advertising codes had been “largely ignored”.

A review panel, reporting to the Advertising Standards Authority, has proposed a single voluntary code on advertising to children to replace the existing two children’s codes which cover food and general advertising.

In a paper featured in the journal today, Swinburn evaluated the proposed new ASA code against eight criteria in the professors’ submission for an effective code.

“The evaluation found that the proposed code largely represents no change or uncertain change from the existing codes,” he said.

Swinburn said the ASA Review Panel received 91 submissions — including 52 from public health and nutrition organisations that called for substantially strengthened codes, and 15 from the food and beverage industry sector, which largely opposed stronger codes.

A third of school-aged Kiwi children are overweight or obese and Health Minister Dr Jonathan Coleman had made it a priority to reduce this rate through the Government’s childhood obesity plan, he said.

Yesterday, Coleman did not directly respond to Swinburn’s call, and said the researcher’s views were “well known”.

ASA chief executive Hilary Souter could not yet share details of the code, but said there had been a “high level of engagement” from industry, and “people want to get this right”.

A spokesperson for the New Zealand Food and Grocery Council said it wanted to see the age of “a child” in the codes redefined from 14 to 12.