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Obama pressed to support restrictions on food ads for children
Seventy-five experts in nutrition, marketing, medicine and public health wrote to President Obama on Tuesday to urge him to fight for restrictions on food advertising for children as the issue comes to a head in Congress.
Republicans and the food and marketing industries have assailed proposed voluntary guidelines aimed at curbing childhood obesity, and the House included a rider in its financial services spending bill blocking the recommendations. Senate Democrats, on the other hand, reiterated their support for the agencies' work in their spending bill.
"While numerous factors contribute to obesity and children's poor diets, food marketing plays a key role," reads the letter to the president. "The Institute of Medicine's comprehensive study of 30 years of research concluded that food marketing affects children's food choices, food preferences, diets, and health. The $2 billion a year that food companies spend marketing to children is testament to the fact that food marketing works."
Also Tuesday, the conservative Bernard Center for Women, Politics and Public Policy released a report arguing that the guidelines would increase the price of food for low-income Americans and cost thousands of jobs while doing nothing to address childhood obesity.
"The proposed guidelines would not serve their purpose: lowering childhood obesity," the report states. "This almost certain failure is not only due to the lack of any real correlation between advertising and obesity, but even more, the result of the proposal’s bizarre ban on advertising foods positively associated with healthier body weights, such as cereal and some yogurts, while inexplicably ignoring calories as an integral part of the obesity equation."
