Why a total restriction on ads for high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) products is needed on social media?
Have a think about how many food related decisions you make every day. How many of these decisions do you think are influenced by what you are seeing, right here on social media?
We make over 200 decisions about the food we eat consciously and unconsciously, and every day we are bombarded with encouragement and opportunity to choose the less healthy options. This primarily comes from paid for advertising, which we know can shape everyone’s, including children's food choices, often not in a healthy way.
Evidence suggests that children's exposure to HFSS products advertising can affect both what they eat and when they eat. This can happen both in the short term, increasing the amount of food children eat immediately after being exposed to an HFSS food advert, and in the longer term by shaping children's food preferences from a young age.
Restrictions on HFSS advertising could therefore help reduce this unwarranted exposure and improve our children's health and wellbeing.
It can encourage companies producing HFSS products to change their recipes (reformulate) in order to make them healthier which would enable them to continue advertising the product. If companies choose to do this, it could further increase the health benefits to both current and future generations.
Besides, most companies with a wide range of products can shift their marketing budget to healthier products and continue to advertise, just not those products we are used to seeing regularly.
Children have the right to be healthy, no matter where they live. Unfortunately, this isn’t happening because those forced to live in poverty are more likely to be living with childhood and adult obesity and have higher COVID-19 diagnosis and death rates. Studies suggest that children from the most deprived households spend more time online than those from the most affluent, and that HFSS adverts have a greater impact on those children too. This suggests that poorer children are more likely to benefit from a reduction in HFSS advertising exposure. A move in the right direction to the aim of ensuring all children have the same chance of a healthy future.
As part of the ‘tackling obesity strategy’ the government committed to taking action on protecting children from HFSS exposure on TV. Now they are going further and consulting on a proposal to introduce a total restriction for these adverts online.
A total restriction online is necessary for many reasons, but let's focus on these two.
- A total restriction can futureproof the policy against changes in children's media habits. Who knows exactly how we will consume media in 10 years’ time? If we learned anything from this pandemic, it is that things can change, and can change drastically. Did you notice how many children were forced to sit in front of a screen to learn when schools had to close?
- There is a huge lack of transparent and independent data on our online media use. Yes, I am sure social media companies have access to so much rich and potentially exploitive data that can literally win hearts and minds – remember Cambridge Analytica? Well, a total restriction means we don’t need to delay and wait for companies to be more transparent about our data and how they target individuals with specific, sometimes tailored ads. Just like alcohol, gaming and tobacco, excessive intake of HFSS products have huge health consequences and our kids deserve to be protected from them. Let’s face it, when a child hides their real age to get an Instagram or Facebook account, who knows if they are exposed to age-appropriate content – no one, because close to no one knows.
Watch this space for more blogs on this topic.
Please share this post, because this platform may not like such restrictions and the less people hear about it, the less support there appears to be for it. Then powerful social media, advertising companies and HFSS food and drink companies may win the battle.
