Dr. Mimi Tatlow-Golden:

I thank the Chairman. I am a lecturer in developmental psychology and childhood and a director of the centre for children and young people's wellbeing at the Open University in the UK. I was formerly based at UCD where, in collaboration with colleagues at Queen's University and Ulster University, I carried out the studies that form the basis of my written submission. Those studies were funded by safefood. I still collaborate with colleagues at UCD, with the Irish Heart Foundation and also do work on behalf of the WHO. I am here today in a personal capacity and thank the committee members for their interest in our work.

Systematic reviews have long since established that marketing exposure to unhealthy food and drinks influences children’s food preferences, requests and eating and contributes to overweight and obesity. International research shows that experimental marketing exposure increases a child's intake by 30 to 50 calories. Given that an imbalance of between 40 to 70 calories per day can tip one into being overweight over time, it does not take much marketing exposure to have an effect. Our research on the island of Ireland showed that by three years of age, children recognised over half of the food brand logos associated with unhealthy food items shown to them, and by the time they were five, they recognised almost all of them.

In 2010, the WHO recommended reductions in the marketing of unhealthy food and drinks to children and this was adopted by the World Health Assembly that same year. A child rights perspective and the upholding of children’s best interests as mandated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child require states to support parents in relation to children's health. All of the responsibility for children's health should not be put onto parents. They cannot be expected to make healthy choices all of the time in an environment saturated with marketing for food products that nobody should be eating except as an occasional treat. Our forthcoming WHO report on the implementation of those recommendations notes patchy progress including in Ireland.

Here in Ireland, the evidence gathered in the safefood study a number of years ago indicated that young children see upwards of 1,000 television advertisements for unhealthy foods per year. This is in a climate of regulation and regulation compliant television, but there are weaknesses and loopholes in the regulations as they stand. The new non-broadcast code is welcome in terms of establishing the principle that we should be looking beyond broadcast television, but it is voluntary, unfortunately, and it lacks defined monitoring mechanisms. We are very concerned about how it is going to play out in reality.

Something potentially radical for children's health and well-being happened here last week with the profiling amendment to the Data Protection Bill, but we will have to wait and see how that works out in practice. It is unclear how the voluntary code provisions on targeting on social media are going to play out. Other forms of marketing beyond broadcast and digital affect children’s eating, such as brand marketing and packaging, but are not regulated. I have made detailed recommendations on same in my written submission and would be delighted to discuss those further.