Is it time to ban junk food advertising for children?

Independent MP and former GP Sophie Scamps has introduced a bill into federal parliament that would restrict junk food advertisements aimed at children. This isn’t the first time a ban on junk food advertising has been floated. But there are more reasons than ever to make it happen.

Listen to Peter Breadon, Health Program Director, in conversation with host Kat Clay, to discuss the bill, and what governments should do to decrease childhood obesity.

Transcript

Kat Clay: Hello, I’m Kat Clay and welcome to the Grattan podcast. Before we begin this week’s podcast, it’s the end of the financial year, and I want to ask you to consider making a donation to Grattan Institute. Our impact this year has been wide reaching. We’ve successfully advocated for expanding paid parental leave to 26 weeks, including dad and partner leave.

A billion dollar tutoring program to help struggling school students catch up and generational reform to Medicare. We know times are tough, but if you’re in a position to give, please do give generously at grattan. edu. au forward slash donate. This week on the podcast, we’re going to talk about banning junk food advertising.

Independent MP and former GP Sophie Scomps has introduced a bill into federal parliament that would restrict junk food advertising aimed at children. This isn’t the first time a ban on junk food advertising has been floated, but there are more reasons than ever to make it happen now. With me to discuss the bill and what governments could do to decrease childhood obesity is Peter Braden, the health program director.

Welcome, Peter. Hi, Kat. So, could you tell me a little bit about what this bill proposes?

Peter Breadon: Under the bill, advertising for a range of unhealthy foods would be restricted. Those foods have been previously defined by health ministers. And agreed, they include things like confectionery, sugar, sweetened beverages, desserts, and unhealthy fast food meals.

So advertising for those foods and drinks. would be banned between 6am and 9. 30pm on radio, on television, and on streaming services. And there’d be an outright ban on advertising them on social media and online.

Kat Clay: So that’s quite a long period of time. And what I found really interesting too about the bill, that it’s including social media, where I suspect a lot of children see the advertising.

And I mean, Sophie Scomps tweeted this fact that I found quite shocking that one in four Australian children are overweight or obese. Is this correct?

Peter Breadon: That’s right. One in four Australian kids and two in three Australian adults. So we’ve now hit a situation where unhealthy weight is the norm. It’s the default.

It’s what we should expect for most people without change. And those rates of childhood obesity and of adult obesity, they’ve been going up. Continuously for decades, so it’s a big problem because that unhealthy weight that brings a lot of consequences for people and for society. It means that an individual’s risk of developing chronic disease is much higher.

So things like diabetes, heart disease, and many, many other things, including various types of cancer. So the risk for the individual. goes up. And the costs of treating obesity today for the healthcare system is many billions of dollars every year and rising. So for people’s health, for the sustainability of a health system under strain, it’s really important to start tackling obesity.

And it’s great to start with kids because we know that for many people. It’s a problem that starts when they’re quite young.

Kat Clay: One of the things I’ve been wondering here, I mean, is there evidence to show that food advertising influences what we eat,

Peter Breadon: especially for children? There is. So there’s a lot of studies on this that suggest that children will learn the brand names of junk food from quite young, and that being exposed to advertising for these products will affect them, making them hungrier, experience Cravings, and there’s also evidence that it will change their diet.

So, in short, these ads work. And that’s the reason that companies spend money on them. One study in Australia found that advertising just for sugar sweetened beverages, the amount spent on that was five times What government spent on advertising to help people stay healthy and exercise and eat better.

So the advertising works and I think parents will tell you that kids are aware of these products and there’s something called pester power where they’ll be agitating and asking for these things. So given the evidence that it seems to work, seems to change children’s preferences for food and even their diets.

means that it’s probably something good to rein in. And I should stress that, like in many areas of prevention, Australia is well behind the head of the pack here. So many, many countries have introduced these kinds of regulations. It started in 1980 with Quebec in Canada, but now there are dozens of countries that have either implemented similar policies or are actively considering it.

Kat Clay: I mean, anyone who’s taken a small child through a supermarket checkout knows what pestipower is. What I’m really interested in hearing about is a little bit more about what countries have implemented these kinds of changes and regulations about advertising, but also what the impact of these changes has been.

Peter Breadon: Well, it’s been pretty widespread, the adoption. So in most continents around the world, from South Korea to Ireland, to Scandinavia, to North America in Canada and South America, there are countries introducing these kind of regulations and the countries that have done well designed and expansive ones like Chile.

For example, I have seen good results. So in some countries you’ve seen a decline in the junk food spending. And one international study, it looked at a large number of countries and it looked at those countries that have no regulation, those that have self regulation, which is where the industry sets its own guidelines, and those that have mandatory regulation.

And in the countries that had self regulation or no regulation, you saw these junk food spending per person increasing over time. But where you had mandatory regulation, like what’s been proposed this week, you saw that spending decline. So there’s good evidence in a lot of countries that this can make a difference.

Kat Clay: So there’s been previous attempts to regulate junk food advertising in Australia. Why haven’t these worked? And why is now the time to act?

Peter Breadon: As I mentioned, many other countries have done this, and it’s far from a new idea. It was in 2009 that Australia’s former prevention agency said, let’s do it. The next year, the WHO, the World Health Organization, said it’s a good idea.

So the idea has been there for a while. A lot of people have introduced it, but we really have to start acting on this now because, as I mentioned, those obesity rates Just keep climbing. So, that’s why it’s an important time to act. The evidence has only gotten stronger with time. We’ve seen from other countries how to do it.

And I also think there’s been a changing attitude in the community in recent years. It’s a bit harder to put your finger on that, but it’s important to note two thirds of Australians, according to polling, support this measure. And only a very small minority strongly oppose it. So I think the combination of it spreading around the world, growing evidence and a pretty high level of public support, plus the really worsening obesity epidemic, all come together to suggest now’s the time for this kind of action.

Kat Clay: And as you’ve written previously on preventative measures, I mean, they do have flow on effect over the years. It’s not just, you see the immediate results, 10, 20 years from now, we’ll be seeing the impacts of those changes.

Peter Breadon: That’s right. And that’s why prevention can be a hard sell for governments in a way, because.

They don’t see the benefits maybe while they’re in office, they might come five, 10, 20 years later. That’s why another policy is really important that we’ve done a report on earlier this year about the center for disease control, a new prevention agency. And we’ve argued that it needs to be a really strong independent entity that can push governments and politicians to make those tough investments for future gains they might not see and get political benefit from.

Kat Clay: So one of the things that you’ve recently written about is this kind of idea of should governments be regulating these things? A matter of personal choice and the question that does come to mind when you’re thinking about kids eating junk food I mean, they’re not the people with the purses here I mean, isn’t it a matter for parents just to say no and to manage these things rather than get governments involved?

Peter Breadon: Yeah, if only it were that simple. I think you just have to step back and look at the trends over time so If obesity has tripled in a matter of decades, is that because people suddenly stopped caring about their health, or they wanted to be overweight or obese? I don’t think it’s the case. I think the environment around us has changed a lot.

Our diets have changed substantially and it’s driven by A lot of forces, some of them are those commercial interests that have been paying for these ads and trying to convince people to eat these foods. Some of it is about cost and time pressure that’s changed. Some of it is about the relative cost of fresh food and more sedentary lifestyles and changing patterns of transport.

So all these factors are combining to change really fundamental things about how society works and our weight and our health. So, the idea that a person can independently weigh up the evidence, make sure they’re fully informed at all times, despite that screaming toddler we mentioned before, it’s a bit unrealistic.

And there’s growing evidence from around the world that many different interventions to promote healthier choices really work. So what we’re talking about here really is It’s putting a bit of a rebalancing of the scales. So these big forces have been changing our choices in ways we don’t always understand.

And this is about government just rebalancing things to make it easier for those healthy choices to compete. And there are a lot of really interesting experiments from around the world that show how powerful these interventions can be. One great example recently was Grattan has previously proposed a tax on sugar sweetened beverages.

And these things have limited or no nutritional benefits. value, but they’re associated with weight gain, with obesity. And so Grattan proposed, let’s tax them to change people’s behavior. In the U S they looked at cities that have this tax and cities that don’t. And they looked at all the birthing data across those cities.

The ones who introduced a tax, they found that there was a big decrease in the rate of gestational diabetes, which has lifelong health risks for the baby and the mother. And this is from a small tax on cans of soft drink, and it can make real life changing impacts on people’s health. I mean, that’s just one study, but there’s many, many examples of where doing a small change to prevention, like restricting advertising, can actually, at a population level, start to shift our health.

Kat Clay: Yeah, and I mean we’ve seen that in things like adding fluoride to the water But also things like taxing cigarettes I mean, you’ve seen those huge behavioral changes in Australia because of those things and important health outcomes as well So true

Peter Breadon: Kat and we should remember although prevention has been pretty slow going in Australia Recently, in the last decade or so, there are some real triumphs that show this can work in Australia as well as around the world.

I mean, you mentioned tobacco. When you bring together all of the levers at government’s disposal, from taxation to advertising and regulating packaging and so on, we’ve seen really so many lives saved. It’s actually transformed our health. And there are other examples, too, like the rates of melanoma have gone down because of these SunSmart campaigns, which combine educating people through advertising, putting up shades at schools, and so on.

And we’ve got thousands of people every year not getting diagnoses of skin cancer who would have if previous trends had continued. So, that’s the really inspiring and exciting part here. We know that ideas like the one in Parliament today If we do enough of them, and if we focus them on the biggest risks, we can really transform our health.

Kat Clay: I think that’s an excellent place to end this. I think we’ll be following eagerly the progress of this bill, and probably have more to talk about as time goes on. If you’d like to talk to us about this ban on junk food advertising, please do find us on social media, at Grattan Inst on Twitter, and at Grattan Institute on all other social media networks.

As always, please do take care and thanks so much for listening.