Health guns fire on obesity front

Health agencies want the tactics used in the 30-year campaign against tobacco turned against junk food.

Groups battling obesity want the educational approach expanded with wide-ranging "environmental" initiatives.

Proposals include bans on junk-food adverts on children's TV or near schools; banning high-sugar and high-fat foods from school canteens; a better balance in TV food advertising, and maximum limits on sugar and fat content in food and drinks.

There is broad support for the Greens' call for a tax on high-sugar drinks, with the proceeds to be poured into nutrition programmes.

A fat tax, panned last year when suggested by Diabetes NZ, is viewed as a long-term goal - the equivalent of the ban on smoking indoors.

Obesity has soared to nearly 20 per cent of the adult population since the mid-1980s and is expected to reach 30 per cent by 2011. Another third of Kiwis are overweight.

The 2003 Children's Nutrition Survey found 31 per cent of youngsters were overweight or obese, and the prevalence of obesity had doubled in six years.

High-fat, high-sugar diets are linked to diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancers, and the Ministry of Health estimates poor nutrition is responsible for 40 per cent of deaths.

"It's a bit like with smoking 20-30 years ago," says Carolyn Watts, past chair of Agencies for Nutrition Action. "We were telling people that smoking was bad for them but we had environments where smoking was completely the norm.

"A lot of children know about 5-plus a day and the food pyramid, but then go to their tuck shops and it's full of soft drinks. They're confronted with TV advertising that's all for junk food - the messages don't really add up."

Child nutrition expert Associate Professor Robert Scragg says it's unrealistic to rely on social marketing to change behaviours. "We really need to pull all guns out on this."

In the 1970s and 1980s, measures to combat smoking included taxation, bans on sales to minors and banning advertising. "Those strategies all worked. We need to see what we learned from the public health response to tobacco and try to apply it to the obesity epidemic."

The advertising industry is reviewing its codes of food advertising and children's advertising.

But Professor Scragg says the Government needs to act "because it's in the interests of television and food manufacturers to keep advertising in this area".

He says a tax on high-sugar drinks is favoured as a first step to prepare the public for a possible fat tax, with the money raised put towards nutritional programmes.

"There's no nutritional benefit from drinking high-sugar carbonated drinks like Coca-Cola. That product is really like tobacco - there's no benefit from tobacco and there's no benefit from high-sugar drinks."

But food manufacturers have also learned from the tobacco industry's experience. The Food Industry Accord, formed a year ago, aims to stave off regulation by showing the industry in a good light. It is committed to the ministry's Heha (Healthy Eating Healthy Action) strategy and is helping to fund nutritional and diabetes programmes.

Accord spokesman Jeremy Irwin says the introduction of salads by fast-food outlets and lower-fat, lower-sugar biscuits and crisps shows manufacturers are responding to changing consumer preferences.

"The food industry is doing something positive about it instead of sitting back and grizzling that people are getting fat because advertised foods are causing it," says Mr Irwin.

"What they forget to take into account is it's what people choose to put in their mouths. If they take, for example, the very high incidence of unbranded fish and chips and unbranded Chinese foods - what is really being purchased by the consumer is unbranded fatty products."