Children are so bombarded with junk food advertisements that it’s having a “devastating effect” on their health, the Heart and Stroke Foundation says in an alarming report that calls for government legislation to restrict marketing food and beverages to kids.
“We’ve got to do something about this, we’re asleep at the wheel here and a great deal of harm is being done,” Dr. Tom Warshawski, a British Columbia paediatrician who chairs the Childhood Obesity Foundation, said Tuesday before the release of the foundation’s annual report on the health of Canadians.
The report entitled “The Kids are Not Alright” accuses the food and beverage industry of “marketing our children and youth to death.”
Ninety per cent of the foods and drinks marketed on TV are high in salt, fat or sugar, according to the report. Kids watch two hours of TV a day on average and spend almost eight hours in front of screens. And the obesity rate continues to skyrocket — to triple the rate in 1979. With the current generation, the report says kids have spent their whole lives eating diets so unhealthy, they are harming their health and shortening their lives.
The link between eating junk food and ill health is very strong and it starts in childhood, said Warshawski.
Children as young as preschoolers are developing high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Elementary-age kids have blood pressure so high it’s associated with decreased cognitive function, meaning they don’t think as well because their brains don’t have good blood flow. By adolescence, 25 per cent of obese kids have metabolic syndrome, a constellation of symptoms including high blood pressure, high blood sugars, bad cholesterol and obesity that is associated with brain changes that result in decreased cognitive function. Warshawski also said teens are also developing Type 2 diabetes, something he never saw when he started practising 25 years ago.
He said that being overweight or obese becomes “strongly, strongly” linked in adulthood with numerous health problems, including heart disease, 13 types of cancer, high blood pressure, stroke and Type 2 diabetes. If you’re overweight at age 40, you’ll lose three years of life expectancy on average, and if you’re obese at that age you’ll lose six to seven.
“That’s the same impact on health that smoking a pack a day has — it’s profound,” Warshawski said. “Most of us won’t let a kid smoke, but we think of junk food as, ‘Ah, it won’t hurt them, a little bit now, they’ll outgrow it.’ We’re just too complacent around junk food.”
As a Windsor mom, Heart and Stroke area manager Holly Kirk McLean said it’s scary to read that this generation of children will not live as long as their parents. Kids grow up surrounded by unhealthy choices, and parents wage a frustrating battle telling them ‘No,’ she said.
“You’re trying to make sure your kids make good healthy choices and then I’m watching when they’re doing research for school (on the Internet) and these ads are popping up for things you know are not healthy, and they’re being presented in a way that’s enticing,” she said. “They’re using every tool at their disposal to get the attention of our children.”
Researcher Monique Potvin Kent “could not get over the numbers,” when she researched all the junk food ads on websites that are popular with children and teens. Internet advertising is cheap, allowing companies to place their ads on multiple sites, her research found. They attract kids to their own websites with the lure of “advergames,” which are video games embedded with their advertising.
Kids join these websites and participate in contests, according to Potvin Kent, who listed the most frequently advertised products on kids’ websites as: Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and Frosted Flakes, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Red Bull energy drink and Kraft Lunchables.
One of the most-visited sites for kids is an education math site loaded with food and beverage ads. “I don’t think teachers realize this,” Potvin Kent said. “It is an educational tool but it is filled with ads.”
The report claims that efforts by the food and beverage industry to self-regulate its marketing to kids has failed and that legislation is required. Proof it works is in Quebec, which banned commercial advertising to children under 13 starting in 1980. These days, Quebec has the lowest childhood obesity rates in Canada and the highest rate of eating fruits and vegetables.
Kirk McLean said such legislation (Sen. Nancy Greene Raine introduced the bill in the Senate last year that would restrict junk food advertising aimed at kids) would help parents in their “universal struggle” to get their children to eat healthy.
You don’t see tobacco companies marketing cigarettes to kids on TV — that was something that was outlawed decades ago, she said. And smoking rates have dropped by more than half.
Dr. Warshawski said restricting advertising is only one part of the solution. Society also needs to reduce sugary drink consumption, improve food labelling and demand quality daily physical activity for kids, he said, adding that parents need to take the threat of junk food very seriously.
“Parents need to be as aware and assertive as they are with tobacco.”
bcross@postmedia.com