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Our doomed relationship with food

Posted in Advertising, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs July 20th, 2007 by Melinda Varley

While the Food Standards Authority and the government have tried to persuade us to eat healthily by banning junk ads to kids, have they given the adults a food complex?

Shows such as The Diet Doctors, You Are What You Eat and Three Fat Brides have been pioneering in educating us about what food can do to our bodies.

But if we put what we’ve learnt from Gillian McKeith and what the government and the FSA says about ‘junk’ food together you’d be forgiven for being a little confused.

ISBA, the voice of British Advertisers, this week released new guidelines as to what foods can be advertised on company’s websites, and what marketing tools to do it.

The problem is, if you read the papers and watch the news, you’ll know this ‘ads being blamed for obesity’ debate has been on-going and still not completely resolved. Worse off, we are forced to make our decisions on what is ‘junk’ or ‘unhealthy’ by a nutrient profile model that estimates the levels of fat, salt and sugar in foods in 100g portions.

If we use this model we are being told that eating a small slice of bread with marmite will make us obese.

Society has some warped view about food marketing. It doesn’t trust us to make our own decisions and by condemning advertisers and producers of those foods, we are made embarrassed if we should dare ever eat them.

But my argument is what can you eat with out being told it’s ‘unhealthy’? How do you measure your food intake? Calories, fats or exercise?

Food’s poor publicity is giving us a food complex and leading to us spending extra hours at the supermarket because the food we’ve been eating all our lives suddenly has fancy labels we have to read. God forbid if someone should see something in your trolley with an orange light, or worse still a red one.