UK austerity plans will be “double-whammy” against children
The UK’s Department of Health (DoH) launched Change4Life on 3 January, with the first airing of TV, billboard and poster ads. The campaign is aimed at families with children under 12, and the TV ad, also available on YouTube, compares a cartoon stone-age family hunting for their food to a modern family playing video games.
The campaign is set to last for three years and initially had £75m (c €83m at today’s rates) of public funds behind it. Commercial companies, said to include the likes of PepsiCo and Kellogg’s, are also involved in the project with sponsorship in the order of £200m reported (The Lancet, Vol. 373, January 10 2009).
However, the recent announcements of widespread cost cutting in the UK and plans by the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s to rely on the food industry to fund the Change4Life anti-obesity campaign have been met with criticism by some researchers and campaigners.
Writing in Food Ethics magazine, Dr Helen Crawley, Reader in Nutrition Policy at The Centre for Food Policy, City University, called Lansley’s plans perverse, and said they risk going “further, faster, in increasing nutrient insufficiency for many children in England”.
The UK government’s plans create “a clear conflict of interest”, said Christine Haigh, of the Children’s Food Campaign, and clashes with the Prime Minister’s pre-election promise to address the commercialisation of childhood.
“The risk is that belt-tightening by ministers will have the opposite effect on children, exacerbating obesity and undoing real progress in helping kids grow up with a healthy attitude to food,” said Dr Tom MacMillan, editor of Food Ethics magazine. “Unless government rethinks these plans, it could find itself accused of child neglect,” he added.
Sceptics
Earlier this year, Professor Tom Sanders, head of nutritional sciences at King’s College, London and a recognised expert on diet and cardiovascular health, told our sister publication FoodManufacture.co.uk: “Despite much well-meant intention, there is no evidence to suggest that Change4Life will deliver change in the vulnerable groups.”
