Policies to protect children from the harmful impact of food marketing: WHO guideline

Overview

Children continue to be exposed to powerful food marketing, which predominantly promotes foods high in saturated fatty acids, trans-fatty acids, free sugars and/or sodium and uses a wide variety of marketing strategies that are likely to appeal to children. Food marketing has a harmful impact on children’s food choice and their dietary intake, affects their purchase requests to adults for marketed foods and influences the development of their norms about food consumption. Food marketing is also increasingly recognized as a children’s rights concern, given its negative impact on several of the rights enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This WHO guideline provides Member States with recommendations and implementation considerations on policies to protect children from the harmful impact of food marketing, based on evidence specific to children and to the context of food marketing.

Guidelines on other policies to improve the food environment are currently under development.