Bernie Sanders: We can't allow the food and beverage industry to destroy our kids' health, wants to ban junk food ads targeted to kids
Bernie Sanders: We can't allow the food and beverage industry to destroy our kids' health, wants to ban junk food ads targeted to kids
For decades, we have allowed large corporations to entice children to eat foods and beverages designed to be overeaten, Sen. Bernie Sanders writes.
Let's ban any ads targeted towards kids.
Let's ban ads. Period.
Eh. Some level of advertising is necessary.
I used to run a Magic: the Gathering shop right when it opened. We had great prices, great prizes, a phenomenal gaming area, and since I was the only employee I knew the customer service was top notch.
None of that would have mattered, though, if people didn't know I existed. I knew I could eventually rely on word of mouth to grow my community, but I still had to get the first customers in the door for the first time.
And coming at it from the other side, lots of online services that we use for "free" are paid for by ads being shown to us. If those ads were banned, we would see large upsets in how those services are paid for. There's potential for good here, since one possible response could be subsidization and commodification of websites like YouTube, reddit, and Facebook, but who knows what the chances of that could be.
Let's ban any ads targeted towards kids.
Mmmm, spicy but it needs something.
Let's ban ads. Period.
Oh fuck! Yup, all done now. Wow! Whew!
I wish but I don't see the industry going down without a fight, starting with kids would be a reasonable first step towards the destruction of ads.
That is one of the things I really like about the rise of streaming services. You can actually pay to avoid ads, which means that, so far, my kids have basically had a childhood free of TV commercials.
Honestly I'm just wondering what would count as advertisement for this, because it effectively bans any form of political campaigning, by candidates or ballot measure groups, except through public speaking events.
You could even say door to door sales and solicitation would be banned, which immediately drags the law into a knock down drag out with the Mormons and JWs, because otherwise they can't send their impressionable young members out to be screamed at and treated like nuisances so they come back to the fold jaded about "worldly" folks.
Let's just ban ads. Marketing alone has done irreparable damage to society as a whole.
If ads work, that means you're manipulating minors. Not acceptable.
If ads don't work, that means you're wasting your money.
Either way, there's no reason advertising targeted to to minors should be allowed.
The advertisers believe that targeting ads to kids is effective to manipulate kids to drive purchases of their products. That's fucking diabolical. Anyone who's in the industry and thinks this is OK needs to be taken to a farm.
I didn’t even know ads aimed at kids weren’t banned. You guys ban kinder eggs but not ads?
I saw one supermarket in my area cover all cartoon characters or similar kid-targeting images on products with stickers saying something like "we don't market to children."
Agreed, no candy, no video games, no TikTok stuff all of it.
We need to stop using tax dollars to subsidize fucking sugar (of all kinds). It should be expensive to make the crap, not cheap.
Oh, and then, likely taxed further when we buy it.
Mexico has a ban on using cartoon characters on the front of any food packages that have warning labels for high calorie, sugar, saturated fat, trans fat, or sodium content.
Honestly kids won't understand the damage of junk food until they get older and it's too late, and the industry knows that.
Kids are also still developing their pallettes. What they eat while they grow completely effects what foods they will desire and associate eating habits with when they grow older. Many junk foods share ingredients and flavours compared to a wider variety of whole foods.
I have zero issues with this. Chester Cheetah shouldn't be allowed to sell chips anymore than Joe Camel. If kids still want it it, let them find it.
Won't anyone think of the junk food manufacturer's profit projections?!
Oh yeah, Congress will.
Thanks to Reagan and corporate lobbying and also MIchelle Obama being a complete shill, all public school food is mass produced diabetes in a can/bottle/cartontm
The chocolate milk has 30g of sugar per serving. All drinks are zero calorie aspartame garbage. Every hot food is just frozen and reheated in an oven. There is no such thing as spice or salt allowed in a school cafeteria. All snacks are baked chips only, no other flavors besides regular and green onion. Fruit is either canned/packaged in dense syrup, or available fresh as a sour apple or orange. Vegetables are reheated cooked slop, or in rare cases provided fresh in a salad bar.
The best bet for anything healthy is probably the orange juice.
It has been more than a decade and I am still immensely pissed off that they took away both regular and spicy funyuns and gave nothing in return >:(
And orange juice isn't healthy: https://youtu.be/qA2tUwrvP2g
Yeah without the fiber of the rest of the orange, it's just like drinking a coke.
I remember when my middle school replaced the soda machines with “juice.” Because Minute Maid is somehow healthier than a coke.
"Why can't we grow corn when we water it with gatorade?"
Frankly just adopt Europe's food health standards and that itself will probably do some decent numbers on improving public health.
Just don't go after portion size, those dish size comparison pics alone probably drive half of America's international tourism.
But muh freedumb
This is what needs to be done. Not taxes or bans on the consumer. Target those profiting from increasing our health care costs.
