Junk food ads to be banned before 9 pm.

[Workingman]

This, it is claimed, will help eradicate obesity and the reason now is that those of us who are a few pounds over a BMI plucked out of thin air are more likely to die or suffer complications because of Covid-19. How patronising.

It is too little, too late, and the days when advertising enticed us into buying this or that have long gone. All today's advertising does is it gets us to swap from one brand of crap to another. It does not put us on the road to obesity, we are already well down that road.

The problem goes much deeper than which products we buy, it is now more to do with the availability of things to eat - notice, not food. Things to eat from sweets to bars to bags of this or that to pies and pasties to takeaways are everywhere. It is almost impossible nowadays to go into a shop and not be offered something to stuff in your face.

In the space of 500m on the main road near me there are two petrol stations and a Co-op. They each have about 100 sq/m of floor space mostly taken up by things to eat - all with the same products from the same producers. The stretch also has a chippy, an Indian takeaway, a Chinese takeaway, two delicatessens, and an Italian restaurant. Then there's the gastro pub a bit further along. For most of us the possibility of getting something to eat is a 24/7 exercise - no advertising needed.

Solve that and we might go some way to tackling obesity.

[cromwell]

The country no leads a more sedentary lifestyle. It's not only children sitting all day in front of a screen, it's adults who work in offices and no longer work in hard manual labouring, those jobs having shrunk in number.
I don't know if there is an answer tbh. Certainly if there were some rules saying only x number of takeaways in your town, but you just know that some lawyer would have that rule in court before you could say "Fish and chips twice".

[medsec222]

I believe we all have to take responsibility for eating healthily but I think it is a good idea if food manufacturing companies could be prevented by law from pumping up their products with fats and sugars. Why should baked beans contain sugar, for example.

[Suff]

This law presupposes that there is some curfew on TV or that kids even watch TV.

In mosmoderhomes neither is a safe assumption.

Doomed to fail before it begins.

[saundra]

Won't make a blind bit of difference
Kids have tv access 24/7
Wast of space

[Workingman]

I just knew that there would be a follow-up government-commissioned review into food and healthy eating, so it's no surprise that the National Food Strategy warns that England's eating habits are a "slow-motion disaster".

It goes on to say that "wilfully misleading" packaging give a false impression that foods are healthy, and that phrases such as "low fat" might mean "high starch" and labels such as "'free from' and 'less' are bandied about without context, which "if not quite lies, are at least wilfully misleading".

And of course there is the agenda driven link with child poverty.

What? Only a few days ago it was all down to advertising before 9pm.

Only 1% of packed lunches meet the nutritional standards of a school meal says the report. Hang on! The vast majority of those eating packed lunches do not qualify for free school meals so they are not in child poverty. That would indicate at least a couple of things 1. their parents are well off enough to afford not to need a free meal and 2. number 1, probably means that they are intelligent enough to know that a Kit-Kat, cheesy strings a blueberry muffin and a can of pop every day are not balanced meals.

And there's another inconsistency and one that runs unchallenged in most of these reports and it is that such foods as takeaways and ready meals are convenient and "cheap" and that's why the poor eat them. It is demonstrably nonsensical but it serves the purpose of those with an agenda.