Children are targets of powerful food marketing campaigns World Diabetes Day: let’s protect …
Cairo, 14 November 2012 – The annual celebration of the World Diabetes Day on 14 November is a reminder that this disease remains one of the most serious and most prevalent chronic problems in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, threatening lives and the overall development in several of countries in the Region. Risk factors for diabetes are unhealthy eating habits and low physical activity, leading to overweight. These risk factors have been steadily increasing among populations of the Region, with the tragic result that six of the ten nations with the highest prevalence of diabetes in the world are in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.
It is therefore very fitting that for World Diabetes Day 2012, the International Diabetes Federation has adopted the slogan: “Diabetes: let’s protect our future”. This slogan focuses on the importance of health education and awareness to prevent diabetes in the upcoming generation of children and adolescents.
For several years now, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been stressing the importance of providing a safe environment in which children can grow with the least possible exposure to risk factors which can impact negatively on health. However, there is evidence that such exposures are in fact increasing. Children are targeted by powerful marketing campaigns prompting them to consume food items with no nutritional value and with quantities of sugar and fat that far surpass their physiological needs. These campaigns include flooding school canteens and vending outlets with harmful food items, and conducting intense marketing through the mass media, just as levels of