It’s time to address our big issue

More research is showing that sugar is actually more addictive than drugs like heroin and cocaine. That’s why if you get children hooked young, they’re screwed for life. How do you get kids started? Hijack their brains with marketing. Junk food marketing to young children is one of the most harmful and remarkable things we allow to happen as a nation. It’s hard enough for adults to escape the junk food prompts everywhere they turn, but for children, they don’t have the cognitive ability yet to recognise what is happening, let alone resist. A study revealed that children eat 45% more after being exposed to junk food advertising during the viewing of a cartoon.  Even I find it a hard battle sometimes to resist the stimuli and I know what’s good for me.This practice is exploiting the vulnerability of a young child, something we put people in jail for.

You can’t let your children watch television without them being bombarded by a hail of junk food ads, you can’t buy any food at the supermarket or tobacconist without junk food being at their eye-level. Even our schools are tainted by big food companies, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. We know the damage it is doing, so why aren’t we doing something? Education and the wellbeing of students should be priority at schools but instead Principals are falling to financial pressures and claiming they need the income generated from the canteen to put towards education at the school. Hmmm, maybe big coke can fund part of your child’s education, but they won’t remember it! Kids won’t be learning much with their brains wired on sugar. Parents trust that when they send their children to school that the school won’t be selling cigarettes at recess time, so why do we allow other disease causing agents to be sold to them?

So, what can be done to put a stop to all this? Well the government can intervene and I believe we’ve reached a point where we need them to. They can actually enforce policy at the school level, they can restrict junk food marketing and sales. They can tax the unhealthy food and subsidise the healthy food. They can provide standard, easy to read front of pack labelling. But every time any of this rhetoric is brought up, it’s slammed by us, by media as ‘the nanny state’, ‘Big daddy is watching over us’, ‘the controlling government is taking away our rights again’. When it comes to addiction, freedom is not what you need. If our freedom allows poison to be advertised, I’ll give up that freedom, thanks. It is the individual’s responsibility in part, but eating healthy in this country is like swimming upstream. Laws such as these would just make it easier for people to make healthier choices. How can we expect individuals to make the right decisions when they don't have the right education and are being fed lies constantly.

The junk food industry is powerful and people are afraid of confronting them, but we were afraid of tobacco too, and look how far we’ve come with smoking. Are we putting private interest and profit ahead of public health?

The government is making efforts but they need to do more. Invest in policy. Invest in education. Embed this kind of learning into school curriculum. Stop the hijacking of our brains. Restrict junk food. Give our kids a chance to resist the addiction. Otherwise the statistics will be catastrophic.

In the mean-time, chose fresh food. Don’t worry about reading packaged food labels. Cook real food. If you can see where it came from, that’s a good thing. You can trust it.