Junk food advertising could be banned across the entire Transport for London
67 replies, posted
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-44071809
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, says he wants to tackle the "ticking time bomb" of child obesity in the capital.
If the proposal is approved, adverts for "unhealthy food and drink" will be banned on the London Underground, Overground, buses and bus shelters.
The scheme is backed by child health experts but the Advertising Association said it would have "little impact".
Mr Khan wants to "reduce the influence and pressure that can be put on children and families to make unhealthy choices".
He said: "I am determined to do all I can to tackle this issue with the powers I have and help Londoners make healthy food choices for themselves and their families.
This is good, I wish this happened everywhere, I personally am one of those who would see big mac pic on passing by bus and I would go get one.
this is a good move.
just last night I was in london passing through a station i frequent, Leicester Square, thinking about how crazy the McDonalds ads were
basically in this station you enter via a staircase, all the way down the stairs are like 5 advertising posters on each side and since I moved to the london area in 2015 these ads have always been owned entirely by mcdonalds. usually showing a cheap menu option like a standard cheese burger, along with the low price in massive text
every time i go down these stairs i crave mcdonalds. I have the self control to brush it off, but when youve got millions of people passing through the underground every day, how many others have the same cravings and arent strong willed enough to resist the urge?
i think overall fast food and sugary drinks need to be controlled more like cigarettes and alcohol are. i hope that in 40 years the idea of selling a double cheese burger or a bottle of coke to a child seems as absurd as selling them a pack of smokes.
That's one hell of a false equivalency.
Er you need food to survive
A hungry person ain't going to give a fuck when he's hungry, if it fills him or her up
I never got the opposition against the banning of junk food ads. It doesn't impact consumers whatsoever, unlike smoking taxes, and it still contributes to reducing heart issues and obesity-related diseases down the line, greatly reducing healthcare costs, relieving pressure and allowing for greater care for less avoidable issues.
It's the best of both worlds really. Then again, I wouldn't be opposed to a junk food tax either, even if I understand the reasoning against it.
What do you consider junk food? Is it a certain percentage of fat/carb/protein ratio? Is it a certain calorie density? I mean, I'm all for less advertisement overall, so no skin off of my back really, but let's not delude ourselves here into thinking that "junk food" is the only way to reach obesity.
I don’t think we should ban the food, but the ads I am happy to have minimized as much as possible
Considering how absurdly addictive sugar can be to children, I don't think it's even that unfair a comparison seeing how much sugar there really is in most sodas.
A bad diet combined with overeating is the primary source of child obesity. Anything with high amounts of calories and sugar is like fucking crack cocaine for kids and people do legitimately own too much of it and buy too much of it for the good of their own children, who are not smart enough to have a proper diet on their own at this point.
A good rule of thumb I heard is "If it doesn't rot, it's not food". That includes a lot, if not all, candy.
I think the biggest concern is sugar levels. A small bottle of soda has well over the daily sugar requirements as it is, and some people drink several a day. Childhood obesity always is a precursor to childhood diabetes.
I have never heard of calories being included in the definition of junk food, only sugar and fats.
I can get behind this. I am also one of those folks who will go and buy a burger after seeing a picture of one.
Not sure what it's like elsewhere, but in the US, there are large beef subsidies that flow into what are essentially meat factories. Not only do they mistreat animals, they more than often get the meat in unclean ways (we have a beef recall almost every year). To build on this, the largest customer for beef in the US is McDonalds, which sells the greasiest, most unhealthy food there is. And they do it for cheap because they can get their beef for cheap, which is made possible by heavy subsidies to itself and to the corn industry (which both feeds cattle, an unnatural food source for it, as well as makes 'high fructose corn syrup' affordable to make cheap soda drinks for).
In many places, a bottle of soda is actually cheaper than a bottle of water.
Yeah, sure, everyone can agree "you need food to survive", but if the food is poison, it's not necessarily okay to eat something just to satisfy short term hunger - especially when it's as addictive as sugar.
is not a psychoactive drug. They are no where near each other in terms of addiction potential to be comparable. So yes that is unfair comparison.
Can't remove second quote on mobile sorry
when you consider how many people die in the UK alone from heart disease and obesity related cancers i don't think im being particularly excessive, especially for soft drinks.
a 1.5 litre bottle of coke contains 63.6g of sugar, that's 212% of how much added sugar the nhs recommends for adults per day (30g). i know people who drink TWO of these things a day and have done since they were 15 or so years old because theyve been addicted to this shit since then.
i don't honestly see how it's ok for kids to buy shit like this
if somehow mcdonalds and pizza hut is the only source of nutrition available to you then by all means eat up, but when you consider in the UK it's estimated that one in every four adults and around one in every five children aged 10 to 11 are obese then i think its time that we took fast food more seriously
don't get me wrong, i enjoy mcdonalds and coke on occasion, the same way that I enjoy alcohol: responsibly and not very often. i don't think that we should be allowing children to abuse things that are this dangerous all while advertising it as if it's normal and fine.
Half measures that won't likely make much of an impact. The primary reason that people eat junk food is because they don't have enough money or time to eat well. You can't fix that by changing the bus signs.
Better than doing nothing? I agree this won't make an impact but with a little hope, it can be the start of something that actually helps.
US corn subsidies are absurd in and of themselves. Farmers grow it in arid areas which is basically the polar opposite of what you're supposed to do (corn grows under tropical climates) which uses up a lot of water. It's an environmental disaster on top of a health one.
This is false.
Food is addictive.
The combination of sugar, salt, and fat is as addictive as any drug can be in our system.
Tests on rats show that rats would prefer to drink a solution containing Sugar, Salt, and Fat, as opposed to a pure heroin drip.
Food is more addictive, when done "right", then heroin in rats. I do not believe that we're much different, or that much more in control of our impulses.
Food is the most addictive, and common thing to be addicted to in our modern society.
If this wasn't true, American Obesity rates wouldn't be where they are.
i always carry a burger on me so that i can eat it there and then instead of giving into the advert and going and buying a burger
Would you say the same think about gambling, and the people who are more susceptible to get addicted to it?
At the end of the day, advertising makes abusive use of our psychological vulnerabilities. To imply that it is the victims' fault when ads successfully manipulate them is an odd way of viewing the issue, to say the least, which ignores the actor with malicious intentions in the equation.
Not sure this is the best evidence to prove that food is 'addictive' when you're offering rats the choice between a solution that will give them sustenance and a solution that will not. Would you rather have this or have heroin is not sufficient basis to call something addiction.
And there are countries with fast food advertisements that don't suffer from America's or even the UK's obesity rates. Food being addictive simply isn't the necessary explanation you're trying to depict it as.
I'd say the biggest factors that exist for it are poverty, lack of education/knowledge/time, and it's designed qualities of addictiveness.
The products are made to be as addictive as possible. How successful that is is up for debate, but I believe it's showing a serious sign of effectiveness. We're hard wired to behave in certain ways, crave certain things, and want certain things. The combination of salt, sugar, and fat is a very enjoyable thing for the brain, but extremely bad for health. Advertising works. It drives the sales of products and helps frame a narrative that these things are actually good.
We're just starting to crawl out from under the Sugar industries thumb, on the healthfood industry. But people are still clinging to old addages that were never true because it's been 40 years of them ruling the roost.
Making your child obese is very similar to making them a smoker, so it makes sense in that way.
Junk food isn't the only way to become a fatass, I did it just eating regular food.
It isn't so much what you eat, it's the quantity.
You'd have to be piling thousands and thousands of calories down, and doing nothing, and have a horrible metabolism to do that.
I've eaten 3000 calories a day, for over a week now, of Fruits, veg, and meat. Nothing else, no breads, sugars, or anything. I haven't gained a pound. In fact, I'm down some weight.
We'll see in a few more weeks how that turns out, but I don't agree that quality food will turn you fat unless you're being truly gluttonous.
You're lucky I have to eat barely anything to lose weight, getting fat is very much genetic, most of my family are overweight even though we don't eat that much junk.
When I was 16-18 I weighed a lot more than I do now, and ate nothing but garbage, nothing but junk food and lots of sugary junk and fatty crap.
In that time frame I've radically changed my diet, so 6-8 years of switching to healthier foods, and changing portion control has a huge result.
It could come down to genetics, but I never felt like I had the metabolism to be skinny until I tried creating a lifestyle that would facilitate that.
Dude its completely what you eat I could make My diet completely whole food vegetables and I'd have to eat 10x what anyone eating fastfood would eat because My diet wouldn't be loaded with massive amounts of sugars and fats.
Weight has nothing to do with genetics that's just an excuse used by fat people so they can feel better about killing themselves with their diet, I was slowly gaining weight over my life span and when I hit 180 I said no more cut out all snacks and have been slowly losing weight.
Your family probably eats more junk than they think.
You're completely wrong, genetics is a factor for weight gain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_obesity
Eating a good diet is of course important, but even with that some people struggle to lose weight.
See, I wonder how much of that is genetics, and how much of that is epigenetics.
Your genetics responds to environmental changes(bad way to put it really), and epigenetics is the process of studying the alteration of the genes expression.
I have a feeling the genetics that leads to obesity is rare, but that there are numerous epigenetic causes that exacerbate obesity and weight issues.
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