From the The Wall Street Journal:
The White House is calling on food makers to curb marketing of unhealthy foods to children, part of a broad assault against childhood obesity.
The recommendation is part of a 120-page report released Tuesday that outlines steps to fight the national epidemic. One in every three children ages 2-19 is overweight or obese, the report says. First Lady Michelle Obama has taken up childhood obesity as her signature cause.
The recommendations are for the food and beverage industry, media and entertainment companies and food retailers. Recommendations from the report urge these parties to:
- Extend their self-regulatory program to cover all forms of marketing to children
- Avoid in-store marketing that promotes unhealthy products to children
- Limit the licensing of popular characters to food and beverage products that are healthy and consistent with science-based nutrition standards
- Adopt meaningful, uniform nutrition standards for marketing food and beverages to children
- Develop a uniform standard for what constitutes marketing to children
- Set uniform guidelines to ensure that a higher proportion of advertisements shown on their networks and platforms are for healthy foods and beverages
- Introduce an on-air labeling system that helps consumers easily distinguish between advertising for healthy and unhealthy foods
- Develop and deploy technology to block unhealthy food and beverage advertising
And if the above doesn’t work, the FCC will be called in to revisit and modernize children’s programming rules.
Click here to download the 120-page report[3.3 MB].
This is a step in the right direction, but is it enough? Self-regulation hasn’t worked well on Wall Street. Will this be enough to rein-in Madison Avenue?
I doubt it, but what do you think?
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Inspired by this tweet by Hank Wasiak.
