Title: Call to Action: Value [the] Meal, Stop Fast Food Marketing to Kids

Author: Kelle Louaillier, Executive Director, Corporate Accountability International

Section/SPIG: Food and Nutrition

Issue Date:

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Children’s health is in decline. One in three American kids are now overweight or obese. Pediatric clinics increasingly witness suffering from diabetes, hypertension, and other diet-related conditions virtually unheard of in children just a generation ago.
 
The fast food industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars relentlessly marketing unhealthy foods to kids. These savvy promotions work at cross-purposes to health educators who do not have the resources to compete with the ad budgets of transnational corporations. Recent reports by the Yale Rudd Center indicate that this predatory marketing leads to increased consumption of fast food among kids. Let’s end this practice and begin to reverse this deadly epidemic, making sure that healthy kids can become healthy adults.

Corporate Accountability International (formerly INFACT) and its Value [the] Meal campaign are focused on stopping predatory marketing of McDonald’s-style fast food to kids.

Corporate Accountability International has compelled change from global giants before, including the Nestlé Boycott on infant formula, Send Joe Camel Packing initiative and development of the Global Tobacco Treaty. This fall, Corporate Accountability International built grassroots support in San Francisco for a policy that limits toy giveaways in children’s meals that fail to meet basic nutritional standards. The campaign mobilized tens of thousands of health professionals, teachers and parents to get involved…and now it's your turn.

Call for an end to the fast food industry’s predatory marketing today!  As health professionals, your voice is critical.  Please e-mail Juliana Shulman or call (617) 695-2525 by April 1 to participate.