CHAPTER 8

THE FOOD INDUSTRY PREYS ON CHILDREN AND SCHOOLS

Kids today are fatter than ever. Obesity rates in children have tripled since the 1970s and now one in three is overweight or obese.1 In fact, one in four teenagers now has type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes2—a condition we used to call “adult onset diabetes”; it was something I never saw in a young person during my medical school training 30 years ago. If a child is overweight, his or her life expectancy may be reduced by 10 to 20 years.3

A major reason for childhood and teenage obesity is the food offered in schools. School meals are often loaded with sugar, salt, processed carbs, and industrial fats. Many schools in America don’t even pretend to offer healthy meals: They let fast-food chains sell pizza and cheeseburgers on school grounds and allow them to slap their logos on cafeterias and gymnasiums.

Kids spend more time at school than any other place outside their homes. The Institute of Medicine calls schools “the heart of health” because they should be a focal point in the effort to help children lead healthy lives. More than 30 million children eat school meals every day, and for many kids from working-class families, these meals make up the bulk of their daily calories. School meals are critical in the battle against childhood obesity and should be held to the highest standards.

Public health officials have long tried to make school meals more nutritious. But an enormous (and familiar) obstacle stands in the way: the food industry. In 2010, President Obama signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a signature piece of legislation that Michelle Obama championed as part of her effort to make a dent in child obesity rates. The law mandated that 100,000 public schools provide healthier foods to their students. It did this by granting the USDA the power to create new nutrition standards for school lunches for the first time in decades.

The law accomplished some good: It essentially banned much of the obvious junk foods from school vending machines, like soft drinks, cookies, M&M’S, gummy bears, and sugar-laden sports drinks such as Gatorade. It created standards for school meals that prioritized whole grains over heavily processed carbs, lowered sodium, and required at least a minimal amount of vegetables per meal. But that’s about all the legislation got right. Sadly, it was fatally flawed from its inception because food industry lobbyists were intimately involved in shaping it.4 And the Trump administration rolled back those improvements, giving way to the food industry lobby and harming our children in the process.5

SCHOOL LUNCH GUIDELINES: PROFIT BEFORE SCIENCE AND HEALTH

More than 111 food companies, trade groups, and industry organizations registered to lobby on the bill.6 They were led by the misleadingly named School Nutrition Association (SNA), a leading industry-funded lobbying organization. About half of the SNA’s $10 million budget comes from big food companies, among them Kraft, Coke, Conagra, and Domino’s Pizza.7 The SNA watered down their criteria for what could qualify as nutritious and pushed for a clause that allowed schools to opt out of the standards. The school lunch lobby fought to ensure that tomato paste would count as a vegetable, making pizza legally a vegetable, and that starchy potatoes—code word for french fries—would be favored in the standards. The two most commonly eaten vegetables in America are officially potatoes and tomatoes—eaten as french fries, ketchup, and pizza. Minnesota Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar lobbied hard for this because the nation’s largest pizza provider to schools, Schwan’s, is in her native state.8

By the time the nutrition standards were finalized, the foods allowed to be sold in schools included toaster waffles with syrup, tater tots, Uno pepperoni pizza, chicken nuggets, funnel cakes, chocolate muffins, and sugar-soaked Slush Puppie beverages.9

With assistance from the food industry, the USDA also created a Trojan horse policy it called Smart Snacks in School. The idea was to hold snack foods to higher nutrition standards. But ultimately it allowed branded junk foods to sneak into schools. While it sounded like a good idea in theory, the nutrition criteria for the Smart Snacks program provided an easy workaround for the industry, which reformulated their products into slightly different junk foods.

Potato chip makers created “reduced fat” versions of their chips that met the Smart Snacks criteria. Cookie companies created “whole grain” cookies and crackers (essentially junk food with a few flakes of whole grain sprinkled in). And instead of offering sugary soda, soft drink makers met the Smart Snacks criteria by offering “100% fruit juice,” which you know by now typically contains just as much sugar as soda. To meet the Smart Snacks standards, PepsiCo offered schools reduced-fat Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch Doritos, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and Oatmeal Raisin Quaker Breakfast Cookies. Pepperidge Farm introduced lower-fat chocolate, vanilla, and “wholegrain” Goldfish crackers. General Mills created reduced-fat strawberry-yogurt-flavored Chex and a line of Fruit Roll-Ups.

All these junk foods carry the same brand names, logos, and characters as their traditional versions—and all of them were allowed into schools with the USDA’s blessing. What’s bizarre and contradictory is the mandate to lower fat in school lunches but allow increased starch and sugar while the US Dietary Guidelines recommend removing any limits on total fat and reducing starch and sugar. No wonder we are all confused. At the USDA, it seems like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

In perhaps the most flagrant example of all, in 2018 the largest public school system in Texas—the Houston Independent School District—entered into a four-year deal with Domino’s to market its Smart Slice pizza in Houston schools. Even though they look and taste like any ordinary pizza, the company claimed its Smart Slice pies were healthful because they contained less fat and sodium than regular pies. The crust is 51 percent whole wheat (just sneaking in under the standards for “whole grain”), and they have low-fat cheese and low-fat pepperoni. Hardly healthy, but enough to meet the government’s anemic standards for “healthy.” Domino’s gave the Houston school district $8 million in exchange for the right to sell these branded pizzas—served in Domino’s-emblazoned cardboard boxes and sleeves—in school cafeterias. The company claims it sells its Smart Slice branded pizza in more than 6,000 school districts in forty-seven states.10 But I guess that’s okay because pizza is a vegetable.

In twisting what originated as high-minded legislation to improve the quality of school food, the USDA created a monster. Its weak nutrition standards, crafted by an army of corporate food lobbyists, paved the way for “copycat” snacks to become a vehicle for Big Food to market its most popular candy, potato chips, and fast foods in schools across the country.

Kids today spend at least six hours a day at school, where they eat breakfast, lunch, and multiple snacks. Removing thinly disguised Frankenfoods from their school menus would have a huge impact on their health.

BIG FOOD DELIBERATELY TARGETS OUR CHILDREN

The government also allows unregulated food marketing in schools. Studies show that 70 percent of elementary and middle school students in America see ads for fast food, candy, and soft drinks in their schools—and those ads have a direct impact, leading children to consume more junk-food-laden diets.11 The implicit message is that teachers and schools endorse the products; otherwise, why would they be allowed in schools? Food companies pimp their junk via direct advertising in classrooms, such as advertiser-sponsored video and audio programming; indirect advertising by corporate-sponsored educational materials; product sales contracts for soda and snack foods; ads in gyms and on school buses, book covers, and bathroom stalls; and “educational TV” such as Channel One. Channel One was available in 12,000 schools and provided ten minutes of current events with two minutes of commercials that go for $200,000 each and reach 40 percent of America’s teenagers.12 We don’t let tobacco makers market their products in schools; why do we let processed-food companies, given that those foods kill more people than cigarettes?13 (Fortunately, in 2018, Channel One aired its last broadcast, although subscribers still had access to the video library.)

Junk-food companies engage in this type of predatory marketing because it’s hugely profitable. An Institute of Medicine (IOM) study, Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity,14 which analyzed 123 peer-reviewed research papers, outlines in frightening detail the methods and practices used by the food industry to target youth through conventional TV, billboards, advertising, and stealth marketing. They pay the best and brightest advertising executives to develop commercials specifically designed to entice children, and they’ve even been known to employ brain-imaging studies to elicit the desired neural responses from the marketing. This deliberate use of brain science to manipulate our children is Orwellian but also effective. This marketing, according to the IOM, deliberately targets children who are too young to distinguish ads from the truth and encourages them to eat high-calorie, low-nutrient (but highly profitable) junk food and to demand these foods from their parents. Kids under age three demand food brands even before they can read (and sometimes even before they can walk).15 These companies hire research firms to learn how to influence preschoolers. Shouldn’t we protect our children?

Every year, companies such as Coke and McDonald’s spend $1.8 billion marketing their products to children as young as two years old.16 The average child between two and fourteen years of age sees ten to eleven of these ads per day. That’s roughly 4,000 ads every year! As you might imagine, the majority of these ads aren’t for apple slices and sweet potato fries. They’re for Cocoa Puffs, Gatorade, and McDonald’s Happy Meals that star SpongeBob SquarePants and the Minions.

Most adults can see a television ad for McDonald’s and pay it little mind. But according to the American Psychological Association (APA), children under the age of eight don’t instinctively recognize the difference between TV commercials and the programs they’re watching, which makes them particularly vulnerable to persuasive messaging. The food industry understands this, and it is why they spend $11 billion just on television ads marketing junk food to our kids every year.17 And that’s just on television. Now kids consume most of their media online.

The IOM report was published in 2006, before the arrival of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, or other smartphone apps. Now the problem of stealth marketing is much worse. The average kid now spends forty-four and a half hours a week in front of screens and is subject to intense and manipulative stealth marketing.18 Stealth marketing is harder to track and includes embedded advertising in movies and television, toys, games, educational materials, songs, and movies; character licensing and celebrity endorsements; and less visible “stealth” campaigns involving word of mouth, cell phone text messages, and the Internet and social media. A new subversive and powerful model for marketing junk food to children is “advergames,”19 “free” social media games and apps that integrate junk food into games for little children. These games are marketing not broccoli but obesogenic foods.20 They drive kids to eat more junk and more food overall. Online marketing is more pervasive, insidious, and effective. In 2002 McDonald’s alone spent $635 million on marketing, most of it targeted at children.21 On their website McDonald’s explains, “Unfortunately, McDonald’s does not give out this kind of commercial information [how much it spends on advertising], as it could be an advantage to our competitors.”

“Advertising directed at children this young is by its very nature exploitative,” the APA says. Much like tobacco companies, food companies target children because they know that the way to hook them is to reach them early, when they’re most impressionable. Studies show that children have an uncanny ability to remember the food ads they’ve seen. Exposure to just a single thirty-second fast-food commercial is enough to instill brand and product preferences in a child,22 and repeated exposure can set the stage for that child to become a lifelong customer.23 Fast food and the marketing behind it can lead to detrimental changes in the adolescent brain associated with dysfunctional eating and impulsive behaviors.24 It can also thwart parents’ efforts to instill healthy eating habits in their kids. Teaching your kids to appreciate real food is a herculean task when they’re besieged with ads for Frosted Flakes and Pizza Hut.

Fast-food ads don’t just play with a child’s psyche, but also have a direct impact on their weight and long-term health. The more fast-food ads kids see, the fatter they become. Scientists have repeatedly shown in large studies that even slight increases in the amount of time kids spend viewing junk-food ads can increase their odds of becoming obese by 20 percent.25 Teenagers are twice as likely to become obese if they see at least one junk-food ad daily.26 One large study of thousands of teens found that 40 percent of them felt “pressured” to consume unhealthy diets by fast-food and soft drink ads. The more familiar they were with these ads, the more junk food they ate, and that was linked to a higher bodyweight regardless of their age or gender.27

Make no mistake: Chuck E. Cheese and Ronald McDonald are manipulating children just as Joe Camel did for decades. Only now, the consequences are more devastating. The obesity rate in kids shows no signs of slowing down. In some states, like Tennessee, almost 50 percent of children are either overweight or obese. The CDC has even begun to document a new category of severely obese kids that it calls Class 3 obesity.28

Even in kids who are not obese, doctors are discovering horrifying metabolic conditions driven by their junk-food diets. Ten percent of children in the United States have fatty liver disease, a condition that was unheard of 20 years ago and that is now quickly becoming the number one cause of liver transplants nationwide.29 Liver centers across the country now have teenage patients on their transplant waiting lists—all because their livers can’t keep up with the heavily processed food they’re consuming.

GOVERNMENT: ON TASK OR FOOD INDUSTRY SERVANT?

With obesity rates soaring and children under siege from a barrage of sophisticated ads and marketing, a coalition of public health groups, medical experts, and children’s health advocates came together to demand that the government take action on food marketing to children. In 2009, Congress ordered the FTC to work with the FDA, CDC, and USDA to recommend standards for food marketing (one of the few times these agencies collaborated). Two years later, the agencies, collectively known as the Interagency Working Group, issued a report that proposed a set of nutrition standards for foods that could be marketed to children. The proposed standards called for the food industry to market foods that were reasonably nutritious—like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products—or products that minimized things like salt, saturated fat, sugar, and sodium.

But the standards were completely voluntary. The food industry was under no obligation to abide by them at all. Still, the mere proposition of nutrition standards sent the industry into a frenzy. Food companies realized that under the voluntary guidelines, which were fairly lax, they would not be able to market their most profitable soft drinks, breakfast cereals, and junk foods to small children. General Mills, Kellogg’s, Pepsi, and an array of other corporate food giants got together and formed a lobbying group to block the nutrition standards. Calling themselves the Sensible Food Policy Coalition, the group plowed almost $7 million into their lobbying efforts. Another corporation that joined the fight against the standards was Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon, the kids’ network whose cartoon characters—such as SpongeBob and Dora the Explorer—star in many ads for junk foods targeting kids. The company poured millions of dollars into the effort.30

Together the companies pressured the government to drop the voluntary restrictions, saying they were unfair and would harm their business. Their lobbying coalition even released a dubious report claiming that the voluntary standards would cause $28 billion in lost sales and revenue and ultimately spur the loss of 74,000 jobs.31 As extreme and predictable as it was, the pushback worked. The then head of the FTC, David Vladeck, issued public statements reassuring companies that the proposed standards were toothless and that the FTC had no plans to regulate them. “The proposal doesn’t ban any marketing or any foods at all,” he told them. “Companies can continue to market and sell the same products they do now. The proposal simply recommends that the products companies choose to market directly to kids—as opposed to the products marketed to their parents—meet the nutrition principles outlined in the report.”32 Good luck with that!

Through its intense lobbying efforts, Big Food effectively killed the already anemic marketing guidelines. As a gesture, the industry formed its own organization, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, through which each company set their own nutrition criteria and pledged to market only healthy foods during kids’ programming, like Saturday morning cartoons. But the criteria were so absurd they were laughable. Under Kellogg’s standards, the company could still advertise Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes to kids. It could also advertise Yogos, a candy whose primary ingredients are sugar and trans fats.33

FOOD FIX: KICK JUNK FOOD OUT OF SCHOOLS

The Boston public school system was once a model of terrible food. Historically most of the 126 public schools in Boston, which serve 56,000 kids a day, didn’t even have real kitchens. They used “satellite kitchens” that consisted of just a freezer and a warming oven. School meals were produced out of state and shipped to Boston schools, where they were heated up in the satellite kitchens—still wrapped in their plastic—and then served to students. In other words, kids were handed TV dinners for breakfast and lunch.38 When Jill Shah, an entrepreneur and philanthropist whose husband founded the e-commerce website Wayfair, saw how Boston Public Schools was feeding its students, she was horrified.

Shah looked into what it would take for Boston to create full-service kitchens and was told it would cost more than the city was willing to spend: at least $1 million. Shah was undeterred. She came up with a brilliant plan that she called the “Hub and Spoke” model. Rather than ship prepackaged meals from out of state, the schools that already had full-service kitchens would prep food for nearby schools, whose kitchens would be retrofitted with special “combi-ovens” that could steam, roast, and even fry multiple types of food simultaneously without cross-contamination. Shah brought in a well-known local chef, Ken Oringer, to teach food service workers how to prepare meals that were healthier but still delicious. The cost of all this was far less than the city had anticipated: just $65,000 to get the program started, much less than the cost of creating brand-new full-service kitchens for every underprivileged school. In fact, the city ultimately ended up saving $3.41 per meal.39

The program, called My Way Café, began as a pilot program at four schools in East Boston in 2017. Prepackaged meals were eliminated. Schools were provided full salad bars and freshly prepared breakfast items—eggs, fruit, turkey, yogurt, and homemade granola. The food was healthier, and students were allowed to choose their own meals. That meant that for the first time they had options. The result? The students loved it. The rate of students eating school meals increased about 15 percent. As a bonus, the program created more jobs for local Boston residents. Shah’s program was so successful that in 2018 the mayor of Boston, Martin Walsh, announced he was expanding it to all of Boston’s public schools. “Boston is leading the way in making sure our students have access to fresh, healthy food,” he proclaimed.40

Boston Public Schools, once a model of poor nutrition, is now a model for how every school district should feed its students. It is a travesty that public schools often don’t even have real kitchens. Most have only deep fryers, microwaves, and displays for candy and junk food at the cafeteria checkout counters. But Shah’s program and others like it are having a wonderful impact on children’s health. They’re models for how other school districts can save money, serve better food, and improve the health and well-being of their students.

FOOD FIX: TAKE BACK OUR SCHOOLS FROM THE FOOD INDUSTRY

Parents, school boards and administrators, and school staff can help implement these changes.

1. Introduce salad bars in schools. It’s been a struggle to get a variety of delicious vegetables into schools. It’s time we introduce a salad bar in every school. It gives kids options, and it can be done at minimal cost. Cincinnati Public Schools managed to install a salad bar in each of its schools in under a year. Programs like Salad Bars to Schools (a partnership of Whole Foods, the United Fresh Start Foundation, the Chef Ann Foundation, and others) are working to do this at a national level. As of 2018 they’ve raised more than $14 million and have used that money to introduce salad bars in 5,354 schools, which serve fresh delicacies like pomegranates and roasted chickpeas.

In 2015 my friend Congressman Tim Ryan introduced legislation called the Salad Bars in Schools Expansion Act, which designates funding to bring more salad bars to school cafeterias across America. We need more bold and creative solutions like this. Congress should go even further and designate funding in the Farm Bill to bring this initiative to every public school in America.

If you’re a parent reading this, don’t rely on schools to feed your children all their nutritious meals. Make sure you introduce them to as many vegetables as you can at home. Serve low-glycemic fruits like berries and apples to them for breakfast. Cook and sauté vegetables for dinner at home and combine them with protein. Make salads for lunch and dinner on weekends and serve them with healthy proteins and fats. If you’re looking for great ideas, refer to my cookbook Food: What the Heck Should I Cook?

2. Eliminate processed junk foods from school menus. Many parents and school administrators think that food needs to look and taste like junk for kids to eat it. That’s why pizza, burgers, fries, and mac and cheese are standard fare in school cafeterias. But a number of schools are finding that kids will eat healthy food if it tastes good and they’re provided the option.

In New York, a nonprofit group called Wellness in the Schools started a venture to develop what it called an Alternative Menu for New York City public schools. This menu features fewer processed foods, more vegetarian entrees, freshly made salads and dressings, and zero sugary drinks or flavored milks. Nothing on the menu costs the schools extra money: It’s all made from the same ingredients provided to every school. How did Wellness in the Schools accomplish this? It’s simple. The group hires recent culinary school graduates and embeds them in public schools for three years, where they show cafeteria workers how to make nutritious and delicious meals from scratch. By the time the culinary grads leave, the school food service workers are well versed in scratch cooking. Wellness in the Schools typically works with underprivileged schools, and for them the program is not costly at all: Most of the money that keeps the program running comes from donors.

3. Ban chocolate milk. Kids don’t need to drink cows’ milk at all; the data is clear that milk is not beneficial and may be harmful for kids, especially skim milk.41 But the National Dairy Council lobby is so powerful that schools will not get funding for lunches unless milk is offered at every meal! At the very least, schools that offer milk can cut out 10 grams of sugar per serving by switching from chocolate and strawberry milk to white milk. San Francisco banned chocolate milk in all its high schools in 2017 after a yearlong pilot program found that removing the chocolate option from its elementary and middle school cafeterias hardly affected the amount of milk consumed.42

4. Support farm-to-school programs. Instead of relying on Big Food suppliers that ship processed ingredients from manufacturing facilities—often from far away—school lunchrooms should procure many of their core ingredients from local farms. This is often relatively inexpensive and easy to do. School administrators who want to learn how to do this can reach out to the National Farm to School Network, which helps schools procure foods from the farms in their area. I’m a big advocate of farm-to-school programs because ultimately kids win, farmers win, and local communities win. It would be wonderful if Congress designated more funding for these programs in the next Farm Bill.

5. Plant a garden at every school. School gardens connect kids to Mother Nature. They teach them about the environment and motivate them to love fruits and vegetables. They give them opportunities to nurture and enjoy plants that they might not otherwise get to experience. They give them an opportunity to be physically active outdoors in the sun. Most important, they can supply fresh produce to school cafeterias. Gardens are both a learning tool for soil, plant science, and entomology and a vehicle for healthy eating. Groups like KidsGardening, FoodCorps, and Big Green, and nonprofit foundations are working to bring more gardens to schools at the national level. But they need more support and funding.

6. Bring back basic cooking skills to schools as part of their curriculums. Home economics was once a given in almost every school in America. But cooking and nutrition classes fell by the wayside as America shifted to a junk-food diet. This is a travesty. Cooking and nutrition should be a part of every school curriculum. This so-called edible education nudges kids to eat more fruits and vegetables and empowers them to make better food choices. A number of nutrition education programs have embraced this mission, like CookShop, the Edible Schoolyard Project, Common Threads, and Recipe for Success. But now it’s time to provide better funding and support so that every kid has access to them.

FOOD FIX: BAN JUNK-FOOD MARKETING THAT PREYS ON KIDS

Unfortunately, some problems only the government can fix. At local and state levels, we also need to limit the reach of fast food—enacting zoning restrictions on fast-food outlets near schools and instituting levies or taxes on fast-food outlets to support community programs for health, education, and so on. On a federal level, we need the FTC to get strict.

The First Amendment doesn’t prevent us from protecting children from harmful marketing and advertising. More than fifty countries (not including the United States) regulate food marketing to children. Even here, Joe Camel is gone. If a foreign country were harming our children in the same way Big Food is currently doing, we would go to war to protect our children.

The food industry is never going to self-regulate to the point of making meaningful reforms. And we can’t wait forever. The FTC could use its authority to rein in the industry’s out-of-control marketing tactics, and lawmakers should enact legislation to protect the most vulnerable.

1. End junk-food advertising to children. The IOM report advises Congress to act to limit food marketing to kids, including bans of cartoon characters, celebrity endorsements, health claims on food packaging, stealth marketing, and marketing in schools, and to provide support for healthier foods. The IOM advises. Congress ignores. Why? They are funded by food lobbyists. Congress and the FTC should ban all junk-food ads from airing during children’s programming, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. According to the Academy of Pediatrics, a ban on fast-food ads aimed at kids would reduce the number of overweight children and adolescents in America by an estimated 14 to 18 percent. Meanwhile, eliminating federal tax deductions for junk-food ads that target children would reduce childhood obesity by up to 7 percent.43 Why should Big Food get a tax break for manipulating our kids into getting fat and sick?

2. End predatory digital ads. In addition to television ads, Congress needs to ban online, digital, and other forms of interactive junk-food and fast-food ads aimed at kids. In many ways these ads are even more harmful because children today spend increasing amounts of time on social media, where regulations are especially lax. In the meantime, pediatricians and family practitioners should discuss food advertising with their patients, encouraging parents to monitor children’s exposure. Medical professionals could also emphasize the importance of good nutrition to help counteract the weekly blitz of junk-food advertising most kids are forced to endure.

Below are just a few of the governments that have taken aggressive regulatory steps. When will the United States join them?

image The Quebec government was the first to forbid predatory marketing, banning fast-food advertising to kids in electronic and print media way back in 1980. This one aggressive measure has had an impact that still resonates today. A study published in 2012 found that the advertising ban led to a 13 percent reduction in fast-food expenditures and an estimated 2 billion to 4 billion fewer calories consumed by Quebec children. It has the lowest childhood obesity rate in Canada.44

image Not far behind Quebec is Sweden. In 1991 the country instituted a ban on all toy and junk-food commercials aimed at children under the age of twelve. To this day, the law remains very popular in Sweden. Sweden has one of the lowest childhood obesity rates in Europe.45

image The United Kingdom has one of the highest rates of childhood obesity in Europe, but British public health officials have begun to take action in recent years. About a decade ago the government implemented a ban on junk-food TV ads aimed at children under the age of sixteen. The impact was so striking that some cities decided to go further. About 40 percent of children ages ten and eleven in London are overweight or obese. In 2018 the city decided to ban all junk-food ads from its public transport system. That meant no more ads for candy bars, soft drinks, and potato chips on its iconic double-decker buses or the Tube. The United Kingdom now has some of the strictest standards in the world. In 2018, its Advertising Standards Authority pulled several online ads created by Cadbury and other candy companies because they did not do enough to prevent adolescents from viewing them.46

3. Parents: Limit your children’s screen time. If you have a child under two years of age, make sure he or she does not watch television or use technology. Studies have shown that it can be detrimental to their brains. Many Silicon Valley tech executives don’t let their children use technology such as smartphones, iPads, or computers.47 They are the ones who have designed them to be addictive. And many Big Food company executives don’t let their kids use their own products (or eat or drink them themselves). For older children, the best thing you can do is tightly monitor their screen time and filter out the programs or channels with harmful ads. Look for programs you can download that are free of junk-food commercials and other predatory ads. Select programs for kids to watch on PBS, which tends to restrict junk-food ads, or Netflix so they won’t be bombarded with food commercials every five minutes. Limit their amount of screen time to an hour or less each day. Strong evidence also exists that screen time is linked to attention deficit disorder in children48 and is the second-biggest driver of obesity after sugar-sweetened beverages.49

We don’t have to sit idly by letting Big Food prey on our children. Let’s protect them at home and in school with nutritious foods and education that builds the foundation for a healthy life. And let’s support organizations and leaders who want to do the same.