WHO calls for more action to protect children from online junk food advertising

Governments need to do more to understand how much children are being influenced by online advertising for junk food and to protect them from it, the World Health Organisation has said.

Despite existing policies, “exposure of children and young people to the online marketing of unhealthy food products tobacco and alcohol is common,” said João Breda, head of the WHO European Office for the Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases.

We have “regulatory frameworks that do not fully protect children and young people and they may need improvements,” he said at the launch of a new report.1

WHO, which has been monitoring digital advertising of unhealthy products to children since 2010, said that though children’s time spent online had increased, little was known about their online activity. Advertisers were constantly one step ahead of governments, the report pointed out, in developing ever more engaging digital advertising. Social media influencers and so called “advergames” were constantly evolving and much harder to track than traditional forms of advertising, it said.

A growing body of evidence had linked exposure to digital marketing with unhealthy eating, WHO said. Curbing this kind of advertising is seen as critical to reducing obesity and non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease, which account for 86% of deaths in the WHO European region. Yet public health experts were using “obsolete tools,” said Breda, and new systems were urgently needed to monitor children’s exposure to digital marketing.

“We are using the wrong ammunition for a very significant problem,” he said. “These technological innovations [used by advertisers] make our restrictions void—they no longer work in this context.

“We need to know more about the children to understand how to protect them in the best possible way. We need to know how old they are, whether they are boys or girls, where they are from, their social economic status. We even need to know what sort of digital device they use,” said Breda. “Then we need to know what sort of techniques—such as paid advertisements or another kind of campaign, including user generated online content—are being used and how children and adolescents engage with those advertisers.”

WHO wants to see a panel based or automated e-research methodology developed that could be used to benchmark and highlight the issues, to encourage governments to take action.

It highlighted the efforts of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which last summer banned advertising of junk food through all types of media where children made up 25% or more of the audience. But charities and campaigners say that advertisers are finding ways to get round the ban. Last June the government committed itself to begin consultation on the idea, proposed by Cancer Research UK, of introducing a 9 pm watershed for all advertising for high fat, sugar, and salt products.

The UK’s Advertising Association has rejected the idea that food advertising is leading to obesity, saying instead that more needed to be done about declining levels of physical activity. It claimed in March that children were exposed to only 11.5 seconds a day of advertising high fat, sugar, and salt products, which it said was an “historic low.”2