Posted by kathryn in Miscellanea

I’ve been reading a lot in the media recently about the Parents Jury. Set up by Diabetes Australia, the Cancer Council and the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity, the Parents Jury is an online resource and forum enabling parents to discuss children’s food, health and physical activity.

Through collective advocacy, they are targeting food industry marketing tactics, aiming to reduce the marketing of products to young children. And it’s not just about television adverts. The Parents Jury scrutinises all marketing techniques, from in-store promotions and product placements, through to emails, sms and sponsorships.

They also have their sights set on schools, wanting to improve the nutritional value of canteen food, while also encouraging schools to provide consistent nutritional messages around the school and promote the benefits of a well balanced and healthy diet.

They have strong opinions and it’s not just about discussion. In their Trial by Jury campaign members are asked to nominate examples of unethical food marketing. A jury of members then passes judgement – guilty or not guilty and results are displayed on their website. This week it was Krispy Kreme’s turn and they were found “guilty”, for directly marketing their doughnuts to children, through school and sports fundraising. As Parents Jury spokesman Dr Anna Peeters says:

“Schools need to be creative with their fundraising activities and ensure that they do not rely on unhealthy, high fat, high sugar foods that send out unhealthy messages to students and their parents. Such activities compromise and undermine the efforts of schools to promote healthy eating and physical activity.”

While the Federal government seems resistant to calls for a tighter control on marketing to children, this topic is not going away. I’ve blogged about this before . With childhood obesity on the rise it seems more and more urgent that we do something. It is simply too easy to blame parents and accuse them of a lack of control over their children.

Food companies pay a lot of money to marketing people to spread the word about their product and increase sales. If marketing to children didn’t work, they simply wouldn’t do it. And yet we expect small children, who still have so much to learn about the world, to be able to understand and with-stand these professional marketers. As Richard Glover put it in the herald a couple of weeks ago:

Fast-forward 50 years and I reckon people will look back at us, amazed. Why did we ever think it appropriate for highly paid adults to devote all their sophistication and intelligence to tempting children to eat food that would shorten their lives?

I’m going to follow the activities of the Parents’ Jury with interest.

19 March, 2007