Childhood Obesity In Canada

Since obesity levels and other health concerns are increasingly becoming a widespread issue, setting limitations on targeting unhealthy foods to children has started to take effect in many countries. For example, although Canada has seen an alarming increase in childhood obesity over the years, the 1980 Quebec’s law that banned fast food marketing in both print and electronic media to children under 13 years old caused expenditures to decrease by 13 percent, resulting in Quebec having the lowest childhood obesity rate in the country. After implementing laws similar to Quebec’s, some cities in the countries Chile, France, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom have started seeing dramatic decreases in childhood obesity rates

Despite the U.S. making efforts to promote healthy foods, it needs to start banning and condemning the advertisements of unhealthy ones, especially to children who will otherwise gain detrimental eating habits that can impact their lifestyles in the future.

However, food industries are working their hardest to defend their actions concerning their marketing strategies, one common argument being that their tactics are not ethically concerning at all but are purely business-related and not forced upon consumers. Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and author of various books relating to nutrition and food, observes the extensive marketing strategies of many supermarkets in her essay “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate.” Nestle discerns,

Undoubtedly, significant issues ranging from the globalization of poverty, access to healthcare, lack of political freedoms, and increase of terrorism and wars are more urgent and pressing, especially since these issues affect people more directly than the slow consequences of unhealthy foods. However, the presence of other ethical issues does not make the ones of the food industries’ exploitation of marketing strategies to innocent children inconsequential. If food industries continue to manipulate the minds of young children in order to solely benefit their businesses, children will grow with these unhealthy eating habits, promoting an obesogenic environment in addition to an extraneous number of health-related illnesses. Since food industries’ advertising strategies to children prove to be unvirtuous, people of all countries need to make more of an effort to limit and ban the companies’ actions, recognizing that their lack of decency, respectability, and morality should not reflect on the lives of the future generations to