Policies to protect children from the harmful impact of food marketing

Book excerpt: Children continue to be exposed to powerful food marketing in settings where they gather (e.g. schools, sports clubs), during children’s typical television viewing times or on children’s television channels, on digital spaces popular with young people, and in magazines targeting children and adolescents. Such food marketing predominantly promotes foods that are high in saturated fatty acids, trans-fatty acids, free sugars and/or sodium (HFSS), and uses a wide variety of marketing strategies that are likely to appeal to children, including celebrity/sports endorsements, promotional characters, product claims, promotion, gifts/incentives, tie-ins, competitions and games. Food marketing has a harmful impact on children’s food choice and their dietary intake. It affects their purchase requests to adults for marketed foods and influences the development of children’s norms about food consumption. This WHO guideline provides Member States with recommendations and implementation considerations on policies to protect all children from the harmful impact of food marketing, based on evidence specific to children and to the context of food marketing.