Transcript
[MELLOW MUSIC]
ANNA TAYLOR
We have really a national crisis of overweight and obesity. One in five of our primary school-aged children start school already overweight or obese. By the time they've left primary school, that's turned to one in three, and if you're poor and living in Britain, your chances of being obese as a child are double those of children who are in very wealthy parts of the country.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
AMANDINE GARDE
Very often in public discourses there is this idea that children have to make healthy choices, that parents have to make healthy choices on their behalf, and so on, and so forth. But this shift the emphasis and the onus for health on children, their families, et cetera.
A children's rights approach places children and their interests at the heart of the policy process, and in so doing, it helps shift the emphasis from a purely personal responsibility approach to a more societal approach to obesity and its underlying causes and the response that is therefore required.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
ANNA TAYLOR
At the end of the day you can make lots of great healthy choices, parents can do that on behalf of their children. And I think we don't want to take away from people's individual agency in saying, Yes, if you have got the knowledge, you've got the money, you've got the right shops available to you, you've got the cooking facilities you need at home, the skills to prepare that food in the right way, yes, you can really carve your furrow and there are households in the UK on extremely low incomes who are managing to do that, and a huge credit to them.
However, that whole idea that you just have to make healthy choices is dependent on all of those different assets and resources being in place. And at the end of the day, it relies on us as consumers, or children as consumers, doing all of the heavy lifting.
AMANDINE GARDE
States have an obligation to ensure that children's rights to health is protected, that children's rights to nutritious food is protected. So as far as obesity is concerned, that requires that states should promote a nurturing environment where healthy food is easily accessible and affordable.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
ANNA TAYLOR
Children are vulnerable to food marketing for a few reasons. One is, marketing and advertising helps to normalize things. One of the tricks of the trade, if you're an advertiser, is that you want to present your product as being something that everybody uses and that you're kind of missing out, you're not like everybody else if you're not using it. They normalize these products and they also build in a degree of aspiration into those products as they present them to children.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
AMANDINE GARDE
In the UK some restrictions on unhealthy food marketing to children were introduced, and they applied to children's programs on television. They were evaluated a few years after they entered into force, and it came out that these regulations were ineffective in a range of ways. So even though this move is to be welcomed as a recognition that unhealthy food marketing is problematic because food marketing contributes to childhood obesity, nevertheless, in practice, the effect of such regulations were insufficient.
Firstly, because children do not only watch children's programs. In the UK, nearly 70% of a program that children watch fall outside the definition of children's programs, so they were still exposed to an awful lot of unhealthy food marketing whilst watching television. Secondly, children are not exposed only to television marketing, they are exposed to a whole array of other forms of marketing on other media, and in particular digital media now has become more popular with children than television.
And therefore if unhealthy food marketing is not regulated on digital media, then this is obviously problematic. People are pressured, children in particular, to prefer unhealthy food, and once again the evidence is unequivocal. It is very clear that unhealthy food marketing influences children's preferences, children's purchase requests, and the pester power that goes with it and ultimately children's dietary choices.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
ANNA TAYLOR
We did a report called Force-Fed a couple of years ago now, which really tells the story of the food system in Britain through the lens of an average income family in the UK, and the conclusion from that report we looked at what the health outcomes are, what their typical shopping basket is, where they're eating out, what are the nutrients in their diet and what's the food environment that they experience.
So by the food environment, I mean where we as individuals interact with the food system. So it's what we see when we walk into a takeaway, it's what we see on a billboard in the street, it's what we see on telly when we are seeing adverts between something we're watching, it's what the environment's like when we walk into the supermarket. That's all of our food environment. And what we found with Force-Fed is that food environment is so stacked against us making healthy choices. This is not a level playing field.
AMANDINE GARDE
If we think, for example, about the affordability of food and healthy food, states should put in place subsidies so that healthier food becomes more affordable, and whether or not people consume such food does not depend on whether or not they can afford such food, they should be able to afford such food.
Similarly, if we want people to consume less unhealthy food, we should increase the price of unhealthy commodities by, for example, taxing sugar sweetened beverages, such as sodas, milk bars, sugary drinks, et cetera, et cetera.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
ANNA TAYLOR
In agriculture policy, at the moment if you're growing fruit and veg in the UK, you benefit very little from the Common Agricultural Policy, which has been the policy which has provided subsidies 3 pounds billion worth of subsidies every year to our farmers here in the UK. But because those subsidies are given on the basis of the size of the land that you have, and people who grow fruit and veg tend to have much smaller farms, fruit and veg growers don't really benefit from those subsidies.
What if we were to think about subsidies and that funding in a slightly different way? And think for example, about the fact that actually technology is moving incredibly fast in horticulture, labor is a massive cost if you're growing fruit and veg compared to if you're growing wheat, for example, where it's largely mechanized. What could we be doing to reduce labor costs? For example, by supporting investments in robotization, what about capital investment funding? Matched funding facilities for farmers to be able to make those capital investments, whereas at the moment the returns on investment are so far ahead they're not able to make those capital investments.
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AMANDINE GARDE
I'm hoping, and this is perhaps very naive of me, that a children's rights approach will remind states of their obligations towards children, and will ensure that children's best interests are indeed recognized as a primary consideration, and in so doing, hopefully the political will develop to translate evidence into action.
ANNA TAYLOR
We think that vegetables in the UK needs an entirely new transformation in the image that they have. At the moment they're associated with something
Worthy, that your mom makes you eat, you have to eat it, it's good for your health, it's not something you want to eat, we want to change that. So we are trying to mobilize a bit of resource to run and do some pilot campaigns, which get kids really excited about eating veg.
Can you imagine a situation where children were pestering their parents to get them to buy them certain vegetables to try? It's sort of unimaginable at the moment for most parents that their children would be asking for those things rather than junk food, but what we want to try and do is change that and actually drive the pester power towards veg.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
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