Sue Kedgley: We need a lot of help in battle of the bulge

COMMENT

Last month, Britain's top food official warned that we are likely to see parents outliving their children - a disturbing first for modern society.

British Food Standards Agency chairman Sir John Krebs said that while we all look forward to a longer and healthier old age, that trend could be reversed. The reason? Children's eating habits - fat, salt and the advertisements that sell them.

This was, according to Krebs, a ticking timebomb for life-expectancy levels.

The national children's nutrition survey - also released last month - showed that Krebs' warnings should be heeded in New Zealand, too. A total of 31.9 per cent of children were overweight, a figure that ballooned to 60 per cent for Maori and Pacific Island children.

Half of all children do not eat enough fruit and vegetables, despite chippies, French fries and wedges being counted as veges. And exercise levels are insufficient to ward off a future epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

The survey is exhaustive: 3275 children were surveyed, at a cost of close to $10 million. What the survey did not address, however, was what we can do to reverse the weighty problem of childhood malnutrition.

Solutions, as befitting the causes of this problem, are varied.

The silver lining in the survey is that parents are doing a good job; children aged up to 5 have healthy eating habits. But the quality of children's diets appears to decline as children get older - possibly because they are making more independent food choices - as they are exposed to more external influences such as advertising, peer pressure and vending machines in schools.

Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, writes that advertising directly to children is both good business and standard practice for many firms. The British director of marketing for McDonald's has acknowledged that the company's advertising is aimed at children aged from 2 to 8, the group most likely to become brand-loyal.

The ability of children to pester their parents is not new, but it is being newly exploited by advertisers. Ray Kroc, the McDonald's pioneer, told Schlosser that "a child that loves our TV commercials and brings her grandparents to a McDonald's gives us two more customers".

The technique often employed is one called saturation advertising - the constant bombardment of children with messages through a combination of television, billboards, jingles and association with sporting and entertainment events. Companies use saturation advertising to sell the message that fast food and soft drinks will make you happy, cool and popular. Saturation advertising is force-feeding our children saturated fats.

This cynical pushing of unhealthy lifestyles, with lifelong consequences, to children without the critical faculties to question or critique needs to be regulated.

A Consumers Institute study found that 27 per cent of advertising during children's television programming was for sweets, 19 per cent for fast-food and 16 per cent for soft drinks. The banning of advertising during such programmes, as is the case in Sweden, Norway and Austria, would be a good start.

Fortunately, the development of eating habits does not necessarily have to result in unhealthy consequences. A person's food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during the earlier years of life through a process of socialisation. Toddlers and children can learn to enjoy healthy food, just as they learn to enjoy fast food.

An education campaign to promote and encourage healthy eating, especially during formative years, could yield enormous benefits to society. Reduced costs to the health system and the improved physical well-being of an active population would be merely two of the benefits, alongside, of course, slimmer waistlines.

Socio-economic factors also play a part in explaining our children's poor nutrition. It does not necessarily cost a lot to eat, but the cost to eat well is not insubstantial - as highlighted by the survey that showed half of all children do not eat the recommended five servings a day of vegetables or fruit.

Gary Keating, the director of the Public Health Association, says that we have "now reached a situation where nearly a quarter of families with children cannot afford to eat properly".

We also need to prohibit the sale of soft drinks in schools. A 600ml bottle of soft drink contains 16 to 20 teaspoons of sugar, and has no nutritional value. The nutrition survey revealed that soft drinks accounted for 25 per cent of children's sugar intake.

Although action from the Government would be positive, schools and parents are quite capable of taking the initiative and doing what is best for their students and children. Hornby Primary School in Christchurch has banned soft drinks, preferring to encourage the drinking of healthier alternatives - water, milk and fruit juices.

Several other primary schools have similar policies. If Britain is anything to go by - there the Food Standards Agency found that 70 per cent of parents wanted a ban on fizzy-drink machines at schools - New Zealand parents will support the efforts of Hornby.

If we want to make sure the $10 million spent on the national children's nutrition survey do not go to waste, we all need to take a long look at why our children are eating poorly.

Regulating cynical advertising directed at children, supporting healthy eating education, improving the socio-economic status of society's most vulnerable members and supporting parents and schools such as Hornby will go a long way to help us win our battle of the bulge.

* Sue Kedgley is the Green Party health spokeswoman.