'Junk food' advertising ban delayed, nanny state fat cat responds

The government pushed back the 'junk food' advertising ban last week. It was meant to start in October but has been postponed for a few months while the government sorts the legislation out. 

 

Greg Fell from the Association of Directors of Public Health is not happy. Regular readers will recall that Mr Fell is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has the say-anything, do-anything attitude that gets you the top jobs in 'public health'. Let's see what he had to say...

 

“89% of deaths in England are caused by illnesses and disease which are linked to the consumption of unhealthy food and drink. The simple fact is that these deaths, including from many cancers, respiratory, heart and liver disease, are preventable.

 

Boom! How's that for a lie to kick things off? Go big or go home.  

It is obviously not true that 89% of deaths are caused by the consumption of 'unhealthy food and drink'. If you click on the link that he provides you will find that: "In 2019, 88.8% of deaths in England were attributable to NCDs." NCDs are non-communicable diseases. That is what you die from if you don't die from an infectious disease, suicide, murder or an accident. In a perfect world, the figure would be 100%. Are some of those NCDs related to diet? Yes. Is 89% the correct figure? No. Nowhere near.

 

The second sentence is almost as misleading. NCDs can be prevented, but only through the spread of infectious disease and violence.

 

“The consumption of unhealthy food and drink is not the result of personal choice. The reality is that with healthy alternatives around three times as expensive as unhealthy options, and our consumption habits heavily influenced by clever advertising and marketing campaigns that are backed by multi-million pound budgets, we simply don’t have the freedom to choose.

 

People choose what they eat so the first sentence is untrue and the size of advertising budgets does not make that choice any less free. The second sentence is also untrue. Fell is just repeating some nonsense from the Food Foundation that I have written about before.

 

“There is no quick fix, but we know from our experience of tackling tobacco harm, that one of the key ways to reduce illness and death caused by harmful products is to introduce tighter restrictions on advertising those products.

 

Fell is using the anti-tobacco playbook because he has no credible evidence that the upcoming ban will work.

 

“There is a wealth of evidence to say that this will work and yet a comprehensive ban has been repeatedly delayed.

 

The evidence provided by campaigners for this ban is, in fact, piss poor. The evidence for banning ads for 'less healthy' food on TV is atrocious and the evidence for banning it online is non-existent.

 

“Again, we just need to look back at how the tobacco industry lobbied to retain their influence to see that the industry giants behind harmful food and drink are using the same tactics. To reduce the numbers of people dying from avoidable disease – something this Government has promised to do – industry voices must be taken out of the equation and the advertising ban should be introduced as planned.”

 

Accusing industries of using the tobacco playbook is a core part of the anti-tobacco playbook. The reason the ban has been delayed is that the legislation was botched because the government spent too much time listening to the likes of Greg Fell and too little time speaking to people who do something useful for a living.

 

In any case, advertisers and broadcasters have agreed not to show adverts for 'less healthy' food from October as part of a voluntary agreement. What page of the tobacco playbook is that on?