Legal and ethical issues: Diet and obesity

 

This article reviews the intentions and assumptions underlying calls for greater regulation of nutrition and health claims in food advertising and examines the likely impact of new European regulation ...

The subject for this issue's Comments section is international advertising issues and challenges. Charles R. Taylor, from Villanova University, provides a commentary that offers a series of suggestion ...

This paper discusses the implications of three weeks of children's commercial morning television in which 212 food advertisements were aired. Food advertising comprised 22.3% of ads sampled and 30 fo ...

This comment piece is a response from Tim Ambler of the London Business School to the paper ‘International food advertising, pesterpower and its effects’, published in IJA 25, 4.

The issue of "pester power" where children influence their parents’ purchasing habits, is a controversial one. This paper reviews a body of international evidence and argues that food advertising does ...

Advertising has been made an easy scapegoat in the debate about childhood obesity. It should not be beyond the wit of the advertising industry to come up with simple arguments to support the freedom o ...

This report discusses the growing obesity epidemic, from a global perspective. It includes information on how obesity is defined via the Body Mass Index (BMI), obesity levels in the top 25 most populo ...

Advertising in the US is increasingly threatened by 'the continual placing of blame for childhood obesity…on food marketing'. New legislative restrictions, in process or proposed, are summarised. But ...

Obesity is a problem around the world but consumers in some countries are more concerned about their weight than in others. In Iran 48% of people are trying to lose weight, in India it’s 40% and in Ca ...

This comprehensive research study reveals that credence qualities are often elaborated and harmonized using different signaling instruments, the choice of which reflect a company's characteristics and ...

In this paper, Professor Tim Ambler of London Business School reviews the findings of the Food Standard Agency’s Hastings Study into the link between childhood obesity and advertising. He also examine ...

Media messages regarding the ever increasing weight gain of children today and their poor state of nutrition are becoming ever more prevalent. Many studies have already been conducted to understand th ...

Advertisers faced some serious challenges during the first half of the 109th Congress, including legislative activity relating to marketing food to children, direct-to-consumer prescription drug adver ...

Attacks on advertising often cite apparently scientific evidence that children cannot understand advertising’s persuasive character and are drawn, in response to advertising, to smoke, eat unhealthily ...

This paper summarises the main national and international legislation concerning advertising to under -14s across Europe. It also outlines self-regulation code of practice and complaints procedures es ...

This NOP Family 1990s article evaluates ways of marketing food and drink to children responsibly. NOP conducted 11 interviews with food retailing professionals looking at current strategies, multimedi ...

Research suggests a modest direct effect of food promotion (in the main, television advertising) on children’s food preferences, knowledge and behavior. This paper hypothesizes that other factors ma ...

One of the main challenges facing the UK food industry is childhood obesity. This paper looks at the steps that manufacturers, retailers and advertisers are taking to deal with the issue and argues th ...

The president of PepsiCo UK wades into the obesity issue with an even-handed analysis of how sterile, unbalanced and counterproductive the debate has been to date. His solution, based on marketing pri ...

On 27 January 2004 the Food Standards Agency (FSA) held a public debate in London on food promotion and children.Two reviews are presented here – from Rachel Carey, Associate Director of the Family Di ...

Obesity is the issue that keeps the food and soft drinks industry awake at night. Mike Detsiny, an experienced marketer, proposes a radical approach for the major companies in the field to address thi ...

Tim Ambler, of the London Business School, evaluates a study conducted by Strathclyde University’s Centre for Social Marketing on behalf of the Food Standards Agency on the topic of obesity. He finds ...

US consumer expenditure by children aged four to 12 during 1997 was around $23.4 billion (approx £11.7 billion in 2008). This paper provides a critical analysis of research investigating how children ...

WARC Hot Topics are the essential guide to debates in and around marketing. This paper explores the key issues surrounding obesity, with onward links to related papers on WARC and the Web.

Over 25 years, 63% of US advertising to children consistently promoted food, of which 28% was for fast food outlets. This paper examines the role advertising plays in the obesity challenge. Between ...

In a pan-European study 79% of child respondents agreed exercise was as important to health as food, while 82% disagreed that it was okay to eat chocolate every day. Physical activity throughout Euro ...

Our need to trust food, and food brands, has become more complex. Given that trust is so fundamental to food, and food brands, it is a surprisingly neglected area for marketing and advertising. There ...

This paper researches whether the food processing industry influences household diet through advertising, using an advertising-augmented Rotterdam model for eleven broad food groupings spanning 1969-1 ...

Looks at legislation and its impact on claims made by advertisers about the nutritional value of the product. Goes on to recap attempts to introduce tax on advertising in selected states on the US - w ...

The paper explores whether and how exposure to media images of thin (or heavy) women positively or negatively affect consumers’ appearance self-esteem. Two moderating factors are identified, the extre ...