June 2017 – Eat This! How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and how to fight back)

June 21, 2017
Tune in to listen to an exclusive interview with Author, Andrea Curtis. Andrea’s latest book

Eat This! How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and how to fight back) will be published by Red Deer Press this year. Eat This! is a guide to recognizing the marketing tricks companies use to sell foods and beverages to children. Learn about the increasingly complex and subliminal tactics used to market to kids. Find out what others are doing to combat them, and what you can do to help. Andrea Curtis is an award-winning writer for adults and children. She has a longtime interest in food politics. Joining Andrea, is Malcolm Clark, coordinator of the Children’s Food Campaign, a project of charity Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming, and Helena O’Donnell Project Manager of the Irish Heart Foundation’s advocacy campaign Stop Targeting Kids.

To view or download a PDF copy of the slides, click the links below:

Eat This! Andrea Curtis

 

Junk-food ban in Canadian schools is working, study finds

The Canada Press // Toronto Star – Michael McDonald
New research has found that students exposed to a school junk-food ban have a lower BMI on average than those who are not. Read more… 

Banning of junk food sales in Canadian schools having a positive effect: study

CBC News

“It’s a small step in the right direction,” said Philip Leonard, a health economist at the University of New Brunswick.
“Combined with other policies of this type, you can hope to see real difference over time.”

Leonard looked at the body mass index (BMI) of 153,000 Canadians, aged 12 to 25, during an eight-year period. Within that sample, compiled from the annual Canadian Community Health Survey, more than 22,000 youths had been banned from buying junk food at school for at least one year.

As a result, the students banned from making junk food purchases at school for five or more years were, on average, about two pounds lighter than students who did not face a ban.

Read full article...

We Need To Use Every Tool To Fix Our Unhealthy Diets

Huffington Post: Blog

It is encouraging to see federal government moving in several important areas to help Canadians make better food and beverage choices

We can’t cure heart disease or diabetes. But we can help prevent or delay them and other chronic illnesses in one vital way — with a healthier diet.

Easier said than done, of course. Most of us consume far too much sugar, saturated fats and salt, largely through highly processed foods. Often without even knowing it. Read full post…

 

 

Canada should ban junk food advertising aimed at kids

Ricochet

The prevalence of ads promoting calorie-dense and nutrition-free food items to children is disturbing. A recent report on the health of Canadians from the Heart and Stroke Foundation examined “how industry is marketing unhealthy food and beverages directly to our children and youth, and how this is affecting their preferences and choices, their family relationships and their health”.

When marketing research confirms that children’s personal preferences can be altered and shaped by advertising, and when we know that children’s critical thinking hasn’t yet developed to the point of discerning the harmful from the harmless, not only is it not fair play to allow them to be exposed to these commercials, it’s ethically questionable.

Parents fret over their kids’ well being and aim to protect them from all harm — whether it be guiding them away from a hot stove or ensuring their online privacy and protection from sexual predators and bullies — but for some reason we’re allowing large corporations, whose only goal is profit, to groom these vulnerable little adults-in-the-making and establish early on that their self worth is attached to something they can buy. It’s time to rein them in.

Read full article…

 

 

To ban or not to ban junk food ads for children

CFJC Today

We stand to lose too much down the road if we continue the charade of praising unhealthy foods and indulging in it, more so when those who deliver the advertisements care squat about our children’s well-being. As with everything else we do in parenting, encouraging them to discern and choose wisely in one area of their life, makes it easier to do the same in others. An addiction, whether to unhealthy foods or other type of feel-good substance, is but that: dependence. Freedom from all of that is a gift our children deserve.

Read full article…

B.C. advocates laud consultation on banning junk food ads to kids

Metro Vancouver
Could Happy Meals and Pirate Paks become a thing of the past in Canada? B.C. advocates hope so.  Read article here…

Government of Canada takes next step to make healthy eating easier for kids

Cision

Parents try hard every day to help their children make good choices, including the food they eat. In fact, ensuring a healthy diet is the most important thing parents can do to ensure the future health of their kids, and families deserve to have access to the best possible information to help them make these decisions.

Today, Joël Lightbound, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Honourable Jane Philpott, Minister of Health, announced that Health Canada is launching a public consultation on restricting the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children. The proposed approach aims to protect children from marketing tactics that encourage them to eat unhealthy foods, and support families in making healthier food choices. Read full article…

Canadian children are consuming five times more sugar than they should

The Globe and Mail 
Canadian children are consuming five times more sugar than they should was published in The Globe and Mail last week. The article quotes Researcher Monique Potvin Kent and Dr. Tom Warshawski, highlights the need for restrictions on M2K and includes findings from Heart & Stroke 2017 Report on the Health of Canadians. Read article here…

Our Kids Should Be Protected from Junk Food Ads

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“We shield our children and young teenagers from many things: Kids 16 and under are protected from overt portrayals of sex and violence on TV and in movies, and from drinking alcohol, smoking, owning guns and signing contracts, to name a few… Yet we let them down in one vital area: a healthy relationship with food. In this we leave our youth alone and exposed to find their own way in a brutal marketplace.” Read more…