Mar

21

Censorship built on junk arguments - Spiked- Topic: Childhood Obesity News

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The IOTF’s rationale rests upon a series of influential recent reports by the American Psychological Association, the US Institute of Medicine, the UK Food Standards Agency, and the UK television regulator, Ofcom. If you peek behind the regulatory curtain, however, the claims about the causal influences of food advertising on children’s diets and weight share a central and definitive flaw in their understanding of what counts as demonstrating causality. In fact, to the surprise of many, TV viewing has not increased during the period of the obesity ‘epidemic’, and some observers suggest that it has not changed for children and adolescents for the past 40 years. Peter Kyle of the University of Lancaster examined the impact of food advertising on food consumption and found no evidence to support the popular myth that advertising will increase market size. Other studies into the effect of advertising of such items as breakfast cereals and biscuits, both frequently cited as bogeymen in the childhood obesity epidemic, have concluded that advertising did not affect market size in any general way or to any material extent. Bob Eagle and Tim Ambler looked at the impact of advertising on chocolate consumption in five European countries in order to test the claim that a reduction in advertising would reduce consumption. Read Childhood Obesity

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