Self regulation of junk food ads in the spotlight again as pressure mounts

23-Sep-2008 - Last updated on 16-Mar-2017 at 03:32 GMT

Dannon has become the latest company to sign up to a scheme against junk food ads for children, but it comes as the kids channel Nickelodeon is accused of mainly marketing products that are of poor nutritional quality.

Dannon, a leading yogurt producer in the US, had declined to join the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative when it was first launched in 2006, along with Nestle which also opted out.

It has now become the 15th company to sign up to the agreement, a few months after Nestle did the same. Dannon said it had been waiting to ensure that the pledge its US arm was making to the CFBAI was consistent with the pledge that Groupe Danone announced at the end of 2007 before joining.

However, self regulation to ensure products marketed towards children meet nutritional standards has again been called into question as analysis by the watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest, found that the overwhelming majority of foods Nickelodeon marketed were nutritionally poor.

CSPI first analyzed Nickelodeon food marketing to children in 2005, and found that 88 percent were nutritionally poor. That same year Nickelodeon told the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it would use its characters to promote spinach, oranges, and other health foods. But advertisements for those foods are now totally absent from the company’s airwaves and magazine ads, the CSPI claimed.

This year the CSPI found 79 percent of the foods marketed to children were foods like sugary cereal, candy, sugary drinks with little or no fruit juice, and fast food. And the percentage of food packages sporting Viacom characters such as SpongeBob contain increasingly unhealthy foods.

Senate committee

Meanwhile the FTC testified before two subcommittees of the US Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday about the results of an FTC study on food marketing to children and adolescents.

The report analyzed data from 2006, largely before industry self-regulatory, but the FTC believes it will provide an important benchmark for measuring the progress of self-regulatory initiatives.

The commission recommends that all food and beverage companies adopt and adhere to meaningful nutrition-based standards for marketing their products to children under 12 and a useful first step would be to join the CBBB (Council of Better Business Bureaus Initiative) children’s food advertising scheme.

Similarly all companies should stop in-school promotion of foods and beverages that do not meet meaningful nutrition-based standards and media and entertainment companies should consider instituting their own self-regulatory initiative.

Advertising and obesity

The idea behind the BBB initiative was to see if self-regulation could do more to address the concerns about child-directed food and drink advertising and childhood obesity.

An estimated 22m children under the age of five are overweight worldwide, according to the latest World Health Organization figures. In the USA the number of overweight children has doubled since 1980.

Dannon has pledged that 100 percent of advertising directed primarily to children under 12 in television, radio, print and Internet venues will be for products that meet nutritional guidelines that BBB has reviewed and approved.

As part of the pledge, which will be fully implemented by January 1, 2009, Dannon intends to feature only products that meet its nutritional guidelines in all advertising directed primarily to children under 12. These guidelines are based on the 2005 US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, among others, for fat, trans fat, saturated fat and sugar.

For example, the company has pledged that saturated fat must be less than ten percent of calories or may not exceed 1g, sodium may not exceed 230 mg, and added sugars may not exceed 12.5g.

Other participants in the scheme include The Coca-Cola Company, ConAgra Foods, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft Foods and Burger King Corp.

Measuring standards

The American Society for Nutrition (ASN) has called for a more science-based and consistent nutrition standard for foods marketed to children and adolescents and expressed caution about the variation between companies in developing them.

It wants all foods marketed to children aged eight years and older to meet a “single, science-based nutrition standard that is consistent with the recommendation in the 2005 US Dietary Guidelines and the IOM report Nutrition Standards for Foods in Schools”.