The number of kids with chronic illness has quadrupled since many of their parents were growing up. Kids in America today have levels of obesity and chronic illness never before seen in human history.
Doctors and public health officials are bracing for a wave of chronically ill young adults with a host of ailments including diabetes and heart disease.
Why?
A driving force behind kids getting sick is a diet based on junk food and largely devoid of fruits and vegetables.
But before you go scolding a whole generation of parents, consider this: Food makers spend upwards of $10 billion-per-year advertising to kids. On TV alone, the average child in the U.S. sees about 5,500 food commercials annually. Most of these ads are for unhealthy products high in sugar, trans fats, chemicals, and sodium.
It’s hard to raise a child to eat healthfully when some of the most sophisticated advertising minds in the world are working hard, night and day, to make our kids demand their products. Advertisers estimate that 1 in 3 trips to fast food restaurants take place as a result of a child’s nagging.
Is the advertising of junk foods to kids moral? Should it even be legal?
The tide of public opinion is turning, and corporate practice may not be far behind. Just two weeks ago, Disney announced that they would ban junk food advertisements on their cartoon shows starting in 2015. Fast food manufacturers have pledged to make their offerings healthier, but so far that’s meant little more than lip service. Many of the “healthy” options from the likes of McDonalds, Burger King, and Denny’s are still loaded with saturated fat, cholesterol and sodium.
Fast Food companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on advertising their products and so many now are specifically aimed at kids, the kids in their ads are complaining to their parents to buy a specific junk food because it tastes better. Advertisers are jumping on the bandwagon of healthy and organic foods, using loopholes to say it’s from an organic source and is natural. It frightens me to see how much leeway these people have with the FDA who are influenced by the money being spent on promotions that benefit them not the consumer is sickening. The fact is, the food’s are mainly junk with little or no nutritional value and to make matters worse the foods are often loaded with unhealthy toxins and contaminants that will create significant health problems. The health problems don’t necessarily appear immediately but are gradual, the constant loading of these toxins which are accumulating in the body have a serious long term effect. Filter organs like the liver and kidney become overworked and function far less efficiently allowing more and more toxins to remain in the body causing more permanent damage.
In my opinion it should be illegal to promote a junk food based on lies to the kids of America; these people should be banned and outlawed from ruining this fine nation. They should be fined hundreds of millions of dollars when they flaunt to rules and be banned from advertising unless they tell the truth about their product.
If you want to get involved, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Food Revolution Summit speaker Michele Simon’s Appetite for Profit are excellent resources.
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