AN AMUSING scene was played out this month at a parliamentary inquiry into the UK’s growing obesity epidemic. One of the witnesses, a food advertising executive, made a statement so jaw-dropping that an MP had to ask him to clarify his words. Yes, said the executive: his client, a fast food chain, sponsored local football games not to promote its restaurants but out of the goodness of its heart. Its motives were “purely altruistic”.
The inquiry is being conducted by the committee of MPs whose job is to scrutinise government policy on health. One of their options is to recommend restricting or even banning advertisements aimed at children for foods laden with sugar, fat or salt. It is a move that is increasingly being advocated in other countries – and, predictably enough, resisted at all costs by the food and advertising industries.
Nowhere is the battle for hearts and minds hotting up faster than in the UK, whose inhabitants once disdainfully watched the US succumb to obesity and now have cause to fear for their own waistlines. More than 80 British-based interest groups are calling for a ban on junk food ads during children’s TV programmes. And in a bid to raise awareness of the problem, John Krebs, head of the Food Standards Agency – one of the government’s official advisory bodies – warned this month that if nothing is done to stop the trend, average life expectancy in the UK will fall for the first time in 100 years.
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Back in Westminster, the MPs’ obesity inquiry is evoking strong echoes of US congressional hearings in the 1990s, in which tobacco industry executives denied that nicotine was addictive and asked how we could really be sure that smoking caused lung cancer. If the analogy between Big Tobacco and Big Food seems harsh, consider the arguments the food industry is deploying to persuade us that it should be allowed to carry on promoting and advertising its products to children.
One of the industry’s main claims is that it is not junk food that is to blame for the rising tide of obesity but our increasingly slothful lifestyles. It’s true that there is evidence to show that we are far less physically active than previous generations. On average, Britons currently watch more than 26 hours of television a week. That’s double the figure for the 1960s. And yet common sense – and the overwhelming majority of scientists – say that unhealthy eating and lack of exercise both contribute to obesity. The only uncertainty is the exact amount of blame that can be apportioned to each factor.
That uncertainty is being seized on by the food industry’s propaganda machine. One obesity expert who wrote a letter to a medical journal stressing the importance of exercise in the energy equation told 91av that she has frequently been “wilfully misquoted” by those denying that diet has any role at all. Food companies usually cite figures that appear to show the nation is eating less than it used to, not more. But nutritionists say those studies are inherently flawed because people invariably downplay how much they have eaten, especially when a health expert is asking the questions. Tellingly, the food industry’s sales figures prove we are eating far more food than diet surveys would suggest.
Another claim aired for the benefit of the MPs is that ads for fatty or sugary foods don’t make people eat more of the stuff; they just persuade them to switch loyalties from one brand to another. Sounds familiar? For the past few decades the tobacco industry has trotted out exactly the same defence of the right to advertise its products.
But in September, the Food Standards Agency published a systematic review of the research evidence on this issue. Contrary to the food industry’s claims, the authors found that ads for, say, a particular chocolate bar boost not only the sales of that brand but the overall consumption of chocolate bars as well. One of the most detailed studies, which got children to keep diaries of their viewing habits, showed that the more food ads they saw, the more calories they ate. Another found that exposing children to TV adverts for sweets made them more likely afterwards to opt for a sweet over a piece of fruit when given the choice.
At present only a minority of governments restrict such adverts. Sweden prohibits TV advertising to under-12s, and Denmark and Norway have similar policies. The British government acknowledges that the issue “needs examining”, but when the minister for children, Margaret Hodge, expressed support for restrictions last month, her own officials distanced themselves from her views when talking to 91av.
The committee of MPs will report their findings early next year. Whether the UK and other well-fed societies can continue simply to carry on as before remains to be seen. The rise in obesity is becoming the biggest health threat to western nations. With hindsight, it seems hard to believe we took so long to see the tobacco industry’s claims for what they were. How long before we see the light over children and junk food?