Background
Children continue to be exposed to powerful food marketing in settings where they gather (e.g. schools, sports clubs), during children’s typical television viewing times or on children’s television channels, on digital spaces popular with young people, and in magazines targeting children and adolescents. Such food marketing predominantly promotes less healthy options, such as sugar-sweetened beverages, chocolate and confectionery, and uses a wide variety of marketing strategies that are likely to appeal to children, including celebrity/sports endorsements, promotional characters, product claims, gifts/incentives, tie-ins, competitions and games. Such marketing negatively shapes food preferences and values. To address this challenge, and to support Member States in developing an enabling food environment to promote healthy diets and improve nutrition, the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed evidence-informed guidelines on policies to protect children from the harmful impact of food marketing.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is now launching a public consultation on its draft guideline. The recommendations of the draft guideline were formulated based on analyses of all published scientific studies on the impact of food marketing on children, the effect of policies to restrict the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to which children are exposed, on food marketing exposure and power and their associations with children’s health, eating behaviours, food-related attitudes and beliefs, as well as of published literature on factors impacting the implementation of food marketing restrictions.
When finalized, the guideline will provide countries with recommendations on measures to restrict food marketing to which children are exposed, including on policy design elements to improve the measures’ effectiveness.
General guidance on
providing comments
Comments on the draft guideline will be accepted via the online form that can be accessed here, 30 June through 31 July 2022. Anyone who wishes to comment must submit a completed and signed Declaration of Interest (DOI) form. An expert peer-review process will also happen over the same period. Once the peer-review and public consultation are completed, all comments will be reviewed and considered in finalizing the draft guideline before final clearance by the WHO’s Guidelines Review Committee. Comments invited in particular on overall clarity, considerations and implications for adaptation and implementation of the guideline, context and setting-specific issues that may not have yet been captured, any errors of fact or missing data.
The public consultation has ended.
Contact
Please direct questions regarding the consultation and its outcome to [email protected] with the subject “marketing restrictions”.