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Ministers focus fight against obesity on
junk food
Last Updated: 2006-11-16 16:37:43 -0400
(Reuters Health)
By Emma Ross-Thomas
ISTANBUL (Reuters Life!) - European and Central Asian
ministers agreed on Thursday to try to make healthy food cheaper
and curb junk food adverts aimed at children in a bid to reverse
a galloping obesity trend.
Ministers attending a U.N. World Health Organisation (WHO) obesity
conference in Istanbul also agreed to reduce fat and sugar in manufactured
food and improve urban planning to make cycling and walking easier.
The U.N. health body estimates obesity will affect one in five
adults and one in 10 children by 2010 unless action is taken.
Already about 20 percent of children in the WHO's European region,
which stretches to Central Asia, are overweight, of which a third are obese. Obesity has tripled
in the past two decades, and six percent of health costs in the
European region are due to adult obesity, the organisation estimates.
Officials said the WHO-backed charter approved on Thursday, although
non-binding, would give extra clout to health authorities and help
convince the public of the scale of the problem.
"The charter... gives more arguments and more authority to health
ministries," Felix Lobo, chairman of the Spanish Health Ministry's
Food Safety Agency, told Reuters.
The charter calls for "economic measures that facilitate healthy
food choices" and for regulations to reduce commercial promotion
of energy-dense foods and beverages, particularly to children.
"Each individual country, having signed it, will have to have a
look at how it measures up," British Minister of State for Public
Health Caroline Flint said.
Delegates say the fight against obesity is hindered by a lack of
evidence as to which methods work, making it trickier than the campaign
against tobacco.
"What we're still lacking is a rigorous evaluation of what works
at scale," World Bank nutrition specialist Dr. Meera Shekar said,
adding no project tried so far had had an impact.
While governments saw a direct result from increasing tax on tobacco,
the impact of changing food prices to spur consumption of healthier
products was less clear.
"This (charter) is a first step with something that needs to go
much further," Swiss Secretary of State for Health Thomas Zeltner
told Reuters, adding a fifth of the children in his country are
overweight.
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Scientists Reveal Eating Junk Food During Pregnancy Could Up Obesity
Risk
Main Category: Nutrition / Diet News
Article Date: 08 Oct 2006 - 0:00 PST
Recent research by the Royal Veterinary College (RVC), London, indicates
that mothers who eat junk food during pregnancy may raise the chance
of having obese offspring that are at risk of developing diabetes.
The study shows the offspring of mothers fed on unhealthy food
with poor nutritional value during gestation and lactation display
poorly developed muscles in comparison with those fed on a more
balanced diet.
The study published in The Journal of Physiology carried out by
Professor Neil Stickland and Dr Stephanie Bayol showed that rats
fed doughnuts, muffins, chocolate, crisps, cheese, biscuits and
sweets during pregnancy and lactation gave birth to offspring with
increased fatness and muscle waste. The offspring also showed signs
of insulin resistance, a condition that precedes the early onset
of type-2 diabetes, as early as 3 weeks of age.
Professor Neil Stickland, from the Royal Veterinary College, said:
"In Western society, the proportion of obese children is increasing.
Childhood obesity is associated with a range of disorders, including
heart disease, arthritis and the increasingly earlier onset of type-2
diabetes, which have important consequences on an individual's quality
of life.
"Our research suggests that healthy eating habits should start
during the foetal life of an individual, before they even reach
school age. The clamour to give children better school dinners is
all very well, but future mothers need to be aware that pregnancy
is not the time to over-indulge on sugary-fatty treats. Eating large
quantities of junk food when pregnant and breastfeeding could be
causing irreversible damage to their unborn children and could send
their offspring on the road to obesity and early onset of diabetes."
Professor Stickland and Dr Stephanie Bayol are currently investigating
the longer term effects of a maternal junk food diet on the offspring's
development and health. They are also investigating the possible
effects of such diets on promoting hyperactive behaviour in offspring.About
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TV ads market junk food to kids, new study finds, USA
Main Category: Nutrition / Diet News
Article Date: 26 Aug 2005 - 0:00 PST
For young Americans, the "food landscape" in television
advertising is packed with junk food, according to a new study.
The study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
is the first to explore the nutritional composition of foods advertised
to children using Nutrition Facts labeling.
Nutrient-poor high-sugar foods - candy, sweets and soft drinks
- dominate (nearly 44 percent) the foods advertised during the TV
programs children ages 6 to 11 watch most, the analysis found. Convenience/fast
foods made up 34.2 percent of the advertisements during the programs.
There are not yet any recommended daily values (RDVs) for sugar,
but these two groups of foods "exceed the RDVs of fat, saturated
fat and sodium, and fail to provide the RDVs of fiber and certain
vitamins and minerals," said Kristen Harrison, the lead author
of the study.
A 2,000-calorie-a-day diet of foods in the child-audience ads "would
exceed the RDV for sodium and provide nearly a cup of sugar,"
said Harrison, a professor of speech communication at Illinois and
an expert on media effects on children and adolescents.
"How many kids actually eat a diet like that, I can't say,"
she said. "But it's important to note that this is the nutritional
composition of the diet being marketed to kids and their families,
and research shows that the more they are exposed to such advertising,
the more likely they are to buy the advertised foods. So, heavy
TV viewers probably follow a diet more similar to the TV-advertised
diet than do lighter viewers."
Given the food industry's heavy marketing of convenience/fast foods
and other refined, high-calorie products, Harrison said, "It
is becoming increasingly difficult for parents to maintain the moderation
necessary to preserve their children's health."
Findings of the study appear in the September issue of the American
Journal of Public Health in an article titled "Nutritional
Content of Foods Advertised During the Television Programs Children
Watch Most." Harrison's co-author was Amy Marske, a graduate
student at the time of the study and now a high school teacher in
Chicago.
Other findings:
* Snack-time eating in TV advertising is depicted more often than
breakfast, lunch and dinner combined. More than half of all eating
is depicted in locations "rarely associated with mealtime eating"
such as in cars or outdoors.
* Junk-food ads dominated, with far fewer ads for breads and cereals.
The ads offered "little representation" of fruits and
vegetables, dairy foods, meats, poultry and fish.
* Child actors' body size was unrelated to their eating behavior,
"suggesting, erroneously, that eating and body weight are not
related," Harrison said.
* Most ads featured no health-related messages. Of the few that
did, the most common message was that advertised foods contained
"some natural ingredients."
Harrison and Marske also evaluated the nutritional content of food
advertised to adults during the most popular TV shows. They found
that those ads were dominated (57.1 percent) by convenience/fast
foods, fat and sodium.
"An individual eating a 2,000-calorie diet composed of the
general-audience foods would consume considerably more than the
RDVs of fat, saturated fat and sodium, while ingesting only a fraction
of the RDVs of fiber, vitamin C, calcium and iron."
Harrison said kids' consumption of TV ads that tout poor food choices
is especially troubling because childhood obesity is on the rise,
TV advertising influences children's food purchases and purchase
requests, and kids see so many TV food ads a day.
Harrison and Marske tallied an average of 10.65 food advertisements
per hour in their sample. Other research has found that preteens
watch on average nearly three hours of television a day, meaning
that "the typical child aged 6-11 years would be exposed to
approximately 11,000 food advertisements each year."
The researchers taped 40 hours of TV programming that aired in
north-central Illinois between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. for five weeks.
Programs were rated most popular nationwide among viewers aged 6-11
years according to Nielsen Media Research.
The sample consisted of the 10 most-viewed hours from each of four
sources: cable programs such as "SpongeBob SquarePants";
Saturday network programs such as "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles";
syndicated programs such as "Everybody Loves Raymond";
and network primetime programs such as "American Idol."
The sample yielded 1,424 advertisements, 426 (or 29.9 percent)
of them for food products.
The researchers then coded each ad as being aimed at a child or
an adult audience; foods by type; verbal or visual health-related
messages; and characteristics of all human characters.
The second part of the analysis focused on the nutritional breakdown
of the advertised foods using data obtained from Nutrition Facts
labels.
Heavily advertised foods included Burger King Kids Meal chicken
tenders, Jell-O Pudding Bites (chocolate and vanilla), McDonald's
Happy Meal french fries, Post Fruity Pebbles cereal and Wendy's
Kid's Meal crispy chicken nuggets.
Despite the heavy marketing of such foods, Harrison and her co-author
say "parental involvement is the most important factor in the
determination of the family diet." "Parents can work to
maintain the integrity of the family pantry not only through selective
shopping, but also through efforts to instruct their children about
food and nutrition."
Also, because research demonstrates a connection between TV viewing
and obesity for children and adults alike, parents could curb eating
in their household by limiting their children's - and their own
- television viewing.
Other adults should join parents in the "food fight"
to combat childhood obesity, Harrison said. The food industry and
advertisers, for example, "bear some responsibility for peddling
nutritionally inadequate foods so aggressively to kids."
"Also, the continued investment of the medical and public
health communities will be needed if parents are to be successful
in helping their children resist the influence of commercial food
advertising."
Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
andreal@uiuc.ed
217-333-2177
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://www.uiuc.edu
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