Nursery World - Government missing opportunities to tackle childhood obesity, say MPs

A new report by the Health Select Committee calls for more robust action by the Government to tackle childhood obesity, including controlling the ‘deep discounting’ by supermarkets of unhealthy food and drink.

The Committee, made up of cross-party MPs, claims that measures in the Government’s childhood obesity strategy, published last August, do not go far enough.

It argues that the strategy contains ‘vague statements’ that are ‘inadequate.’

Within the report, MPs call for more do be done to reduce the number of cut-price and multi-buy offers on unhealthy food, along with rules on junk food advertisements to be made tougher – recommendations they previously put forward to Government to tackle obesity, but they say were either ignored or rejected.

They suggest a range of measures to regulate junk food adverts seen by children on TV, including extending current restrictions so that they apply across all programmes that children are likely to watch, rather than to just programmes specifically aimed at children, as is currently the case.

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