W.H.O. Protects Kids

The World Health Organization just published new nutritional criteria to protect kids from marketing that promotes unhealthy foods and non-alcoholic beverages. It's called the WHO Europe nutrient profile model and basically what they did is they classified all products. They have its 10,000 products. No, i'm sorry, it's over a hundred thousand products that they've ranked and which is 108,578 products that they've done, and basically it's a guideline for Europe for what you can and cannot advertise to kids, because what they really want to do is get kids on the right diet early. And we know that we have here a major problem with advertising to kids for food, and they've broken it down to three categories. Low, which is five percent of reference intake. Medium, 25 percent of reference intake. High, 95 percent of reference intake. And they've calculated on fat, a total fat, saturated fat, free sugars and sodium. And you know, we can only hope that this takes hold and we do something similar here. We've had major fights for years about advertising to kids and a lot of the companies have said yes, you know we'll put in things, but then social media hits the roof and we're seeing a lot more on social media of advertising junk food and foods that are high in sugar to kids. And let's not forget that you know, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer are the diseases that are linked to our diets with high levels of saturated fats, free sugars, sodium and the like. So if we can, bring this to our shores. I think it could do some good for us as well.

Sally: Yes, i agree that we do need to set the bar somewhere. We need to set a standard that food companies need to meet in order to advertise to children. Our children are spending a lot of time on TikTok and video games, and we've already seen reports and issues with products such as energy drinks being heavily promoted on these platforms. You know when these children are probably way too young to be consuming these types of types of beverages. So setting the bar somewhere is great. You know, in this European region where they are putting these rules in place or putting this tool in place for companies to assess their products, 46 of those 53 countries have more than 50% of the population that is obese, and one in three children are living there overweight and or obese. So it is definitely necessary that we take some steps to protect our children so that we can change the trajectory of our eating habits and they can grow up with better habits.

Phil: Yeah, because you know if we can change behavior, it's going to stick, versus a lot of these drugs like Ozempic now and things that and we've talked about that before that people are taking so that they can drop 20, 25 pounds, but as soon as you stop taking it, that weight comes back on and you really haven't changed behavior. So it's really important.