Junk Food Advertisements.... Unethical?

[En Passant]

The number of kids and adults who suffer from obesity and diabetes are at an all-time high. I think one of the larger reasons for this is the amount/variety of junk food on the store shelves. Foods that appear to be healthy are often loaded with fat and sugar. The majority of this junk food is targeted to children with the use of cartoon characters - is this ethical?

I had a business perspective when I first thought about it – buyer beware. The food companies are selling a product like any other business and it is the buyer’s ultimate decision to decide what he puts into his mouth. But then I had to take into consideration how gullible and naïve children are. I remember times when I was a kid where I wanted to try a particular product based solely on the ad I saw on TV (even when I had no idea what the product really was).

Also, the junk food is not just geared for children. What about un-educated adults who do not know what constitutes bad or good food, or how to properly read labels?

I really think junk food can be compared to cigarettes. Both have addicting qualities and both can cause serious health problems. What are your thoughts?

[dylan's alias]

I hate the argument that junk food is like cigarettes. Cigarettes are addictive and clearly cause heart disease, lung disease and cancer. There are no redeeming qualities to cigarettes (other than that people like them).

Junk food, on the other hand, is food. If you can't tell the difference between food and junk food, and choose to compose your diet of too much junk food, its your own problem.

Junk food is nowhere nearly as addicting as cigarettes (if it is addicting at all) and the adverse health outcomes can't be compared. Without junk food, there would still be fat people. Without cigarettes, there would be essentially no lung cancer and no emphysema.

[En Passant]

I guess I worded what I wrote wrong.

Food that is marketed as being healthy, is often not healthy. For example, some cereal brands are marketed as being good for you, but are loaded with sugar and other crap that clearly is not good for you. Is this ethical?

[dylan's alias]

This is a very different question. I think that there should be serious regulation by the FDA of any product that claims "health." This should include claims that food products are healthy and should also be extended to cleaning products that promote their health benefits. Vitamins, nutritional supplements, "natural male enhancement", Head-On, you name it. If you want to claim a health or medical benefit, there should be some oversight by the FDA.

But I'm discussing legality/regulation. Ethics aren't really the issue, as far as I'm concerned. There's an arms race of bogus health claims and any product that doesn't jump on seems doomed to fail (or at least that's what the advertising agents would have the manufacturers believe).

Again, there is no comparison to tobacco. Claiming that there are nutrients in cereal and that cereal can be part of a healthy diet is nowhere near the outright lies that the tobacco industry told for decades.

[DrewDevil]

Let parents decide what their kids eat and not the gummint please, thanks.

[27offsuit]

[ QUOTE ]
Let parents decide what their kids eat and not the gummint please, thanks.

[/ QUOTE ]


Yah, that always works well:




It always makes me sad/mad when I see two big fat [censored] walking around with their poor fatass children. Through almost no fault of their own , their parents have ruined every aspect of their current and future lives by giving them three 2 liter bottles of Coke a day and all the ding-dongs and ho-hos they can stuff in their mouths.

The only vegetables the eat are mashed taters swimming in butter and french fries.


These people should be fined at the very least.


On a side, the image I used has the little fatass sporting a mohawk. Not one kid I've ever seen with a mohawk who was younger than 10 had normal parents. They were always, white-trashy, or biker-scummy, or just plain dumb-assy.
They were always those 'friends/parents' who want to hang with the kiddies and be thought of as cool.

I often see children in these heartbreaking situations where you can see both parents are morons and they are destined to a life of crap and it just breaks my heart...

/rant

[DrewDevil]

As bad as that situation is, it's far better than having some bureaucrat lording over your food bill and issuing tickets/summons for poor food choices.

[dlk9s]

I guess I'm confused as to what junk foods are marketed as healthy.

Sugary cereals, maybe, but they do have redeeming health values with all the vitamins and minerals with which they are fortified. As has already been said, parents should be smart enough to know what's what.

I've never seen a Twinkie marketed as "part of a balanced diet." Now, junk foods are often marketed towards kids, but that's a different argument. Then again, more "adult" junk foods, such as premium ice cream, are marketed towards adults.

Nutritional information is clearly displayed on products, so if someone isn't sure, they can pick up the box and read.

[secretprankster]

[ QUOTE ]
Nutritional information is clearly displayed on products, so if someone isn't sure, they can pick up the box and read.


[/ QUOTE ]

Well a bulk of the problem obviously lies in the lack of education the public has about healthy eating. It's futile to pore over nutrition labels if you don't even know what you're looking at. Food companies play on the general public's ignorance when marketing their products.

You cited a good example with how they tout the vitamins in something like Count Chocula (c'mon, lol). Anyone with half a brain should be able to look past stuff this thin, but most don't. Healthy cereals are really among the worst. It's just that lots of kids can get away with it because their metabolisms are running sprints at those ages.

Then there's stuff like trans fats, which we've talked on these forums quite a few times. If you look on the side of a Skippy Peanut Butter jar, it clearly says that it has partially hydrogenated vegetable oils as an ingredient. Yet not only does the nutrition label say 0g trans fats, but the front label brings ATTENTION to this fact, essentially screaming "TRANS FAT FREE!" This is because they keep it to under .5g trans fats per serving, so they can round it down to 0 as per FDA regulations. A small amount, but over even one jar of that stuff it adds up hardcore.

This stuff extends further though. Walk up and down your chips, dips, cookie, and ice cream aisles. Everything has a "low-fat" option these days - when the main obesity-related issue of these foods was not necessarily ever the fat content, but the carbs. Plus there's an entire misconception that dietary fat consumption is 1-correlated with human fat gain, so you've got a gazillion women avoiding all fats and just creating a horrible imbalance.

Rambling a little, but you get the point. The sad thing is that even places that supposedly take pride in their healthy items are really deficient in many ways in that aspect. Take a look at Whole Foods. They've got rows and rows of protein bars which are primarily made from soy protein, and equally as many boxes of nuts that appear healthy at first glance ("Organic!"), but are actually often drenched in bad oils or sugars.

[DrewDevil]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Nutritional information is clearly displayed on products, so if someone isn't sure, they can pick up the box and read.


[/ QUOTE ]

Well a bulk of the problem obviously lies in the lack of education the public has about healthy eating. It's futile to pore over nutrition labels if you don't even know what you're looking at. Food companies play on the general public's ignorance when marketing their products.

You cited a good example with how they tout the vitamins in something like Count Chocula (c'mon, lol). Anyone with half a brain should be able to look past stuff this thin, but most don't. Healthy cereals are really among the worst. It's just that lots of kids can get away with it because their metabolisms are running sprints at those ages.

Then there's stuff like trans fats, which we've talked on these forums quite a few times. If you look on the side of a Skippy Peanut Butter jar, it clearly says that it has partially hydrogenated vegetable oils as an ingredient. Yet not only does the nutrition label say 0g trans fats, but the front label brings ATTENTION to this fact, essentially screaming "TRANS FAT FREE!" This is because they keep it to under .5g trans fats per serving, so they can round it down to 0 as per FDA regulations. A small amount, but over even one jar of that stuff it adds up hardcore.

This stuff extends further though. Walk up and down your chips, dips, cookie, and ice cream aisles. Everything has a "low-fat" option these days - when the main obesity-related issue of these foods was not necessarily ever the fat content, but the carbs. Plus there's an entire misconception that dietary fat consumption is 1-correlated with human fat gain, so you've got a gazillion women avoiding all fats and just creating a horrible imbalance.

Rambling a little, but you get the point. The sad thing is that even places that supposedly take pride in their healthy items are really deficient in many ways in that aspect. Take a look at Whole Foods. They've got rows and rows of protein bars which are primarily made from soy protein, and equally as many boxes of nuts that appear healthy at first glance ("Organic!"), but are actually often drenched in bad oils or sugars.

[/ QUOTE ]

Who do you think is responsible for the "low-fat" craze?

Hint:

It's the "U.S. Government" and that stupid "food pyramid."