Junk Food Advertising and Childhood Obesity

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Maggie Throup

Tuesday 16th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effect of junk food advertising on obesity in children.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries, for what I think is the first time. I thank colleagues across all parties for supporting my bid for this debate to the Backbench Business Committee, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for understanding the importance of junk food advertising and its impact on childhood obesity and for granting this debate.

If hon. Members will excuse the pun, the size of the issue is getting bigger. Some 23% of children in reception are overweight or obese, rising to 34% of children in year 6, and the prevalence is higher for boys than girls in both age groups. Over the last 30 years, there has been a substantial increase in average weight in the UK and, at the same time, a decline in the quality of diets. It is predicted that if current trends continue, half of all children will be obese or overweight by 2020, which is just two years away.

Obese children are about five times more likely to remain obese in adulthood, so acting early can protect them from a lifetime of avoidable ill-health and disease. Obesity can lead to a number of serious and potentially life-threatening conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Recently, cases of type 2 diabetes have been reported in teenagers, although until now it has been recognised as a disease of older age. Obesity costs the national health service an estimated £5.1 billion and the UK economy £27 billion each year, so it is of the utmost economic importance that the obesity epidemic is addressed. I fear that those costs are grossly underestimated.

Obesity is strongly linked to socioeconomic deprivation. Findings from the most recent national child measurement programme show that inequalities in obesity prevalence between the most and least deprived quintiles of children in reception are widening faster than expected. Obesity is also twice as prevalent among children living in the most deprived parts of England than among those in the least, and patterns are similar across Scotland and Wales. That reflects the fact that families from lower socioeconomic backgrounds across the UK have the poorest diets, high in saturated fat and low in fruit, vegetable and fibre consumption.

Research also shows that the poorest UK households are exposed to twice as many television food adverts than the most affluent viewers. That exposure is problematic. Food advertising in the UK disproportionately features unhealthy food items, and young children are especially vulnerable to marketing techniques that promote unhealthy food. The pervasive harms of adverts place untold pressures on the poorest in society. Children with low nutritional knowledge are more likely than those with higher literacy to select unhealthy meals after seeing junk food adverts. Junk food marketing exacerbates health inequalities, especially among very young children and adolescents.

Over the last couple of years, there has been much focus on the impact of sugar on children’s health and the growing problem of obesity. However, we must not lose sight of the role that foods high in fats and salt play in the epidemic of obesity sweeping our nation. I am sure that Jamie Oliver’s visualisation of the amount of sugar in fizzy drinks in teaspoons helped the public to understand the issue, but we need to go further. The salt content of processed food has decreased over the past decade, mainly as a result of successful campaigning, and it is now common to find low-fat alternatives on supermarket shelves, but there is more still to do. As we focus our minds on trying to rid ourselves of those few extra pounds we mysteriously gained over the festive season, it is the right time to focus the Government’s mind on continuing measures to continue to tackle the obesity epidemic.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate, and she is making a powerful contribution about the scale of the crisis. Prevention is clearly more important than cure, but given where we are now, does she acknowledge that we also need to focus on cure? Does she share my concern that too few clinical commissioning groups are commissioning tier 3 services, which can make positive interventions to support seriously obese children?

[Maggie Throup]

I agree completely. We need to consider prevention, cure and treatment. It is a huge problem, and it will not go away unless we tackle every aspect of it. The hon. Gentleman makes a good point.

The debate in Parliament on the impact of junk food, by which I mean food high in fats, salt and sugar, is not new. I talked to somebody just last week who gave me the insight that we have been discussing it for getting on for 15 years—probably more than that, if we backtrack even further—and we still do not have the courage to ban the advertising of products with such a major impact on the health of our nation and our future generations.

Recently, the Select Committee on Health held an inquiry and produced a report, “Childhood obesity—brave and bold action”, followed up in a short report early last year. Both reports contained a strong call for a ban on junk food advertising before the 9 o’clock watershed, yet that was sadly missing from the Government publication “Childhood obesity: a plan for action”, introduced in August 2016.

I am delighted that new rules on advertising were introduced by the Committee of Advertising Practice in July 2017—their impact is still being analysed. The rules banned the advertising in children’s media of food or drink products high in fat, salt or sugar. The restrictions now apply across all non-broadcast media, including print, cinema, online and social media, but that does not solve the problem. In 2015, Public Health England recommended extending current restrictions to apply across the full range of programmes that children are likely to watch, rather than limiting them to children-specific programming. Yes, restrictions apply to advertising high fat, salt and sugar products during prime time, but only when the audience is made up of 20% children or more.

A recent study commissioned by the Obesity Health Alliance found that 59% of food and drink adverts shown during family viewing time would be banned from children’s TV, yet hundreds of thousands of children are exposed to them every week. In the worst-case example, children were bombarded with nine adverts for products high in fat, salt and sugar in one 30-minute period. Adverts for fast food and takeaways appeared more than twice as often as any other type of food and drink advert, while adverts for fruit and vegetables made up just over 1% of food and drink adverts shown during family viewing times. The study also showed that the number of children watching TV peaks between 7 pm and 8 pm, definitely not when children-only programmes are shown.

Although I recognise that advertising restrictions in the UK on high fat, salt or sugar products are among the toughest in the world, we need to be even tougher. The childhood obesity plan published by the Government in August 2016 states that it is only the start of the conversation. This debate aims to help continue that conversation and focus on other measures that the Government can take to stop and reverse the obesity epidemic.