Childhood Obesity Marketing Strategy

Since environment has a huge impact on childhood obesity, most children who are overweight or obese usually have overweight parents, it is commonly accepted that parents have responsibilities to prevent their children away from unhealthy condition and exert control children’s behaviour to build a healthy diet. Although parents’ role is important, when we focus on the environment of our society today, the unhealthy food market is also a big risk for childhood obesity. However, marketing to children seems special because children may incapable to afford the price of products by themselves, in other world, they do not have rights to choose the food on the market sometimes. But build a right-based approach of marketing to children is crucial on

The WHO notice it is necessary to take measures to regulate childhood obesity on marketing strategy, the framework for implementing the recommendations on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children gives guidance on how to implement these recommendations. These recommendations are guiding the Member States to distinguish new or strength existing policies on marketing to children in order to regulate childhood obesity. The evidence of tobacco is widely proved that price can considerable influence the consumption, several researches show that increasing the price of unhealthy foods can decrease the consumption of those food thereby lowering the extra calories intake. In the strategy, it suggested that government can adopt a combination of increasing the unhealthy food and sugar beverage price and decreasing the price of healthy food, such as vegetables and fruits, can encourage consumers having a healthy diet. Furthermore, taxes on the unhealthy foods is a way to develop the government financial growth. As a study of food prices and consumption in China shows, increases of unhealthy food prices are associated with decreased consumption of those food. According to this recommendation, the WHO also mentioned that Member States should identify and address the specific national approach depending on its own situations, thus can derive the

So, monitoring media advertisements can control the consumption of HFSS food and drink, as well as the excess calorie intake and childhood obesity.

The European Parliament and Council of the EU adopted the Audiovisual Media Services Directive on 10 March 2010 (Directive 2010/13/EU) regulating the media instruments. As it stated in the Article 9(2), ‘Member States and the Commission shall encourage media service providers to develop codes of conduct regarding inappropriate audiovisual commercial communications, accompanying or included in children’s programmes, of foods and beverages containing nutrients and substances with a nutritional or physiological effect, in particular those such as fat, trans-fatty acids, salt/sodium and sugars, excessive intakes of which in the overall diet are not