The professor spearheading the DH’s Responsibility Deal has slammed Labour’s plans for a crackdown on ads aimed at children, claiming they would achieve only a “tiny fraction” of the action needed to tackle obesity.
Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at the Nuffield department of primary care health sciences and chair of the Responsibility Deal Food Network, told shadow health minister Luciana Berger at a conference this week far more had been achieved by collaboration than would have been by legislation.
Jebb argued Labour’s plans - which would see a clampdown on the marketing of HFSS products to children by requiring manufacturers to reformulate or face a ban on marketing to kids - were a piecemeal answer.
“Although mandatory targets are without doubt an option they would need to be far broader than would be achieved just by setting targets for foods primarily marketed to children,” Jebb said, as Berger chaired the session at the Westminster Forum in London.
“That is going to give us a tiny bit of partial action in the market and is not going to change the vast majority of people’s diets, which is what we’ve been trying to do through the collective and voluntary action of the RD,” she added.
Last month, Berger told The Grocer Labour planned to tell producers of products such as cereals, chocolates and crisps they would have to reformulate or be banned from marketing to kids.
But Jebb said the voluntary approach had been far more successful than such a policy could hope for, citing the reduction in sugar in soft drinks and the voluntary reduction on portion sizes. “By marshalling corporate action we’ve begun to achieve something on portion size that stands a chance of putting the brakes on supersizing.”
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