To think that banning junk food advertising won’t solve obesity?

[MyWaryUser]

People make their own choices - how much do ads really influence them and isn’t it just a scapegoat?

If ads didn't make people buy and eat junk food, the food corporations would not spend megabucks on marketing and advertising. So I disagree

I suppose if you're trying to give anything up or cut down and you keep seeing constant reminders, it's not going to help.

I'm not sure anyone's claimed banning the adverts will 'solve' obesity?

I agree. People already know about McDonald’s, greggs and cheap freezer food, they know it’s cheap and they will continue to buy it.

There needs to be more innovation around marketing cheap fresh fruit and vegetables, plus more healthier convenience foods.

I doubt taxing farmers more and removing revenue from marketing companies will help that…

I was in Spain for a few weeks this summer and noticed that there was hardly any junk food advertising anywhere. And they eat better than us. The UK consume more UPFs than the US now - we are the worst. Advertising those foods normalise them. Something has to change.

You are onto something here.
MaccyD, and all the others are wasting their money on advertising and they never realised.
This is going to wipe millions off the country's GDP

If adverts didn’t work McDonald’s etc wouldn’t do them.

All sorts of snack food items are becoming increasingly junkified. So many chocolates and chocolate items now have so much fat and so much sugar and not so much cocoa - hardly eat them now because it's not easy to find ones I actually consider nice. Many producers in pursuit of lowering rising costs are lowering the quality of the product (even where this wasn't sky high to begin with).

Let's look at the products themselves and not just their advertising.

It's not going to solve obesity, which is a wider societal problem, but neither does this in itself cause any harm. Unfortunately, while an ad blocker can protect you on the web, in many other spheres people are being constantly subjected to advertising. Consumers will not be missing out because they're not being inundated by one type of ad for a specific type of product.

There’s research evidence it does work. After TFL piloted it. It’s now being tested and researched in other areas. We live in an environment that promotes the causes of poor health and the NHS is picking up
the cost. It’s not ‘our’ fault we buy this stuff, our brains are wired to respond to delicious pictures of burgers and cheap offers and then the instant taste reward for little effort.

www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2022/junk-food-advertising-restrictions-prevent-almost-100000-obesity-cases-and#:~:text=Restrictions%20for%20junk%20food%20advertising,Behavioural%20Nutrition%20and%20Physical%20Activity.

I’ve just watched the documentary on iplayer with Dr Xand about UPF - it was really interesting. They were talking about ten psychology behind these foods. Everything about them is designed to appeal. Not just packaging but even the noise they make when you open them! I’m not sure what the answer is to get on top of things. Banning cigarette adverts certainly seemed to reduce the numbers of people smoking/starting smoking so there’s something in it. So has raising awareness of the damage to health. But there’s still people smoking so it’s not just that in itself.

I'm fat and have been since I was a kid. I watch streaming services with ads off, I don't read magazines, I have ad blockers on my browsers.....

I don't buy food because ads tell me to, I buy food that I see as I'm walking round the shop and that I have eaten before and like.

I think banning adverts will have very little effect, but it's cheaper than actually providing medical interventions, ensuring that people have enough money to buy food or educating people who weren't taught how to eat healthily, so............

It's a multifaceted problem, advertising is part of that imo.

I agree that it won’t make much difference. What would though is banning deals of unhealthy food. Go around any supermarket and 80% of the food on offer is junk. Chocolate, crisps, biscuits, sugary cereal. Ban the lot. If a supermarket wants to put food on offer try fruit and veg, tinned pulses. Rice.

There should also be a maximum permitted area of a shop to be used for unhealthy food. Take out the crisps, biscuits, chocolate, alcohol, fizzy drinks, UPF from most shops and there’s barely anything left.

I understand and usually I'd say that banning this and that won't help

But honestly, I'm on a weight loss journey, and junk food ads are the bane of my life. It's honestly hard to stick to eating healthy when I see a mcdonalds ad pop up 😢

I think it really will help those who are trying to live healthily, to cut down on junk food. And help stressed parents whose kids are being influenced by these mcdonalds ads and start nagging them every 5 mins.

I feel embarrassed about it, but it's the truth x

Edited to add that making food more expensive and banning deals just won't help. People are struggling and need all the help they can get. Sometimes a deal on snacks etc really helps out families. But yes, banning adverts all the way.

People take recreational drugs and they're not advertised.
So no it wouldn't stop consumption.

I'm no expert but I always thought that advertising wasn't to increase usage but to gain and increase a market share.

For example - everyone washes their clothes. Persil doesn't advertise to encourage people to wash more clothes but to make sure people use Persil when they do wash their clothes.

McDonalds knows some people like junk food and will eat it regularly. They don't think they'll suddenly convert healthy eaters - they want the percentage of the population who eat crap to eat their crap.

It is now £13.50 for a pack of twenty cigarettes and the age of buying them has increased.

When I started smoking I could buy a ten pack (now banned) for less than my daily dinner money, then sell a few at inflated cost and get my dinner money back, plus some extra to go against a 3 litre bottle of cider on Friday night….

Also vaping is now a thing, I know 3 none smokers who are addicted to vaping in their 30s.

This is correct, most advertising campaigns are to secure brand loyalty not increase awareness, maccies know their customer base is time and money poor, they want to seem more attractive than KFC or Burger King.

It would definitely help. The thing about junk food, is that it is not ‘food’. It is an industrially produced edible substance, largely without nutrients.

What would make the biggest difference is plain packaging, like for cigarettes. When all the beige crap was just displayed as beige as in a buffet, it looks so unappetising compared to real food. But in colourful wrappers and packaging it looks so enticing, compared to raw ingredients.

There needs to be a muti pronged approach like the one taken with smoking. Stop advertising and showing it as desirable. Make it prohibitively expensive and difficult to access/enjoy. Ensure influencers (in the broadest sense) portray it as unaspirational and unsexy, and offer a viable alternative. Its never going to happen though, as those with the vested interest in selling it have too much power.

I think the reference to cigarettes is an interesting one. People used to smoke. Now they don't, they eat bad foods instead. I wonder which did more harm and which deserves more vilification.

When I was at school, in the equivalent of Y7/8, we had domestic science. It would be helpful if it could be reintroduced to give young people the basics of of cooking and budgeting.

It wouldn’t stop people eating junk food in the same way as the smoking adverting ban didn’t stop people smoking. Did reduce it though!

Again correlation does not equal causation; the only time regulating smoking ads reduced smoking was when they had to stop saying smoking was healthy in early 1900s 🤦‍♀️😂

Banning adverts will do nothing. Too much of our food is cheaply produced and marketed to time poor people with a limited budget.

Maccies spends much of its marketing budget on being red tractor, and marketing their burgers as British unprocessed beef. Then it does trying to convert vegan Jenny from the local yoga group to start liking Big Macs. As they want to seem like the less unhealthy option of the fast food places you was going to shop at anyway. And get more brand loyalty.

Banning ads would just make places like maccies go back to having even shittier ultra processed food, and sell it for even cheaper. As why should they bother raising standards if they can’t market, they only have price left to compete with their competitors

We don’t Have adverts and we buy junk and take away. I see it in say Sainsbury’s looks nice, god price I’ll buy it.

Wow , McDonald's spent £89.74 million on advertising in the UK in 2020 - for nothing.