Dr. Mimi Tatlow-Golden:

My vision is that children would have marketed or advertised a diet that reflects what their diet should be. The situation is inverted at the moment; the food pyramid is on its head in respect of what is advertised and so on. There will be many steps along the way to achieve that. Those steps can be picked off, one by one, or we can think about more achievable goals we can start with.

Relatively simple measures could be taken, which we recommend in the forthcoming World Health Organization, WHO, review, such as targeting what children are viewing rather than programming targeted at children. We should seek to have a nutrient profile model that restricts the foods that are advertised even more than is currently the case, even with its cheese derogation. There should be a statutory rather than voluntary code for broadcast marketing. The current code launched by the Department of Health is voluntary, and all the evidence shows that voluntary codes are not as effective. It must be well monitored and a transparent monitoring mechanism must be defined in advance. There are many parts to the code, and questions have to be asked about how they will work in practice. Brand equity characters need to be dealt with, which are the characters which are not brought in from another programme but which are associated with the product. Companies are really wedded to those for obvious reasons because they are powerful marketing tools. We need to deal with brand marketing, rather than just marketing for foods. These are difficult issues to address because companies will say that they need to reformulate and that they need space to do that. Hard questions need to be asked about them.

Information must be provided in schools and preschools. I asked the St. Angela's College representatives earlier whether marketing is part of the junior certificate curriculum, and they said that there was not really any but that there was space for teachers to insert it. It would be nice to develop, and I will talk to them about that.

Ultimately, two actions must be taken. We need to understand that choices are not made by people standing in a vacuum; they are made as a result of endless influences. We have to do away with the language of healthy choices and come up with a different phrase, because it implies that the individual, as an agentic person, whether child or parent, can make all these decisions themselves. We have to have a whole systems approach to this. The no-fry zone initiative has to be a part of it, but the entire system has to be mapped and tackled from all angles, because it affects the parents as well as the children.

That will keep us busy for a little while.