Junk food marketing to children campaign.

References: British Heart Foundation (2015) Briefing: Junk food marketing to children campaign. Available at: http://www.sustainweb.org/resources/files/other_docs/CFC_junk_food_marketing_to_children_joint_briefing_2014.pdf (Accessed: 27th August 2015).

Following on from a post I made earlier about 'Food marketing to children in the UK', I talked about how an article on Which? points out how there are loopholes in the system which enables advertisers to target children quite easily through TV advertisements. 

I have now come across a campaign which is trying to stop these loopholes. The British Heart Foundation teamed up with Children's food campaign are aiming to take action against these regulations.

They want to:

1. Move the responsibility for developing, monitoring, and evaluating advertising regulations to a body independent of the advertising industry.
2. Amend regulations to prevent TV advertisements for unhealthy food and drinks before 9pm.
3. Introduce consistent and effective regulations to protect under-16s across

all forms of media. The new regulations should:

• Include all marketing techniques
  
• Distinguish between healthy
  and unhealthy products using a validated nutrient profiling model
  
• Establish a means of determining whether a product or promotion is targeting children 
  

They say that Children should be protected from commercial interests that encourage them to eat foods that are high in saturated fat, salt and sugar. To improve their dietary health and life chances, they must be protected from the marketing of unhealthy food and drink.

They say that the changes they want to make would help protect children from junk food marketers and the pressure they create for them to choose unhealthy food and drinks, whilst still allowing the advertising and promotion of healthy products. 

I think that what they are attempting to do is a great idea, it shows that there are actually people out there trying to make a change. I hadn't heard about this campaign until digging quite a bit so I would like to see what efforts they are making to promote the campaign in order to get help from others. It's all well and good wanting to make a change, but I would like to see what actions they are taking in order to move forward.