Many foods for children are unbalanced «kleinezeitung.at

Food for children is enriched not only with cartoon or game characters, but also with a lot of sugar and fat.

1:30 p.m., August 25, 2021

Too sweet, too greasy, too salty – this still applies to many foods marketed to children. This is the result of a study conducted by the German Foodwatch Consumer Organizationwhich was released on Wednesday. According to this, 85.5 percent of the tested foods advertised for children (242 out of 283) are unbalanced according to the standards of the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Products advertised to kids with cartoon characters, online sweepstakes, and game giveaways are basically sugar bombs and greasy snacks.. Oliver Huizinga, campaign manager at Foodwatch, said neither the voluntary commitment to more responsible children’s marketing nor the federal government’s (German, NB) sugar-reducing program has changed anything.

Corporate self-discipline isn’t worth much

The products examined came from a total of 16 food companies in Germany, who have signed the Responsible Marketing Pledge to Children, as announced by Foodwatch. The last investigation by consumer advocates was six years ago. Since then, the proportion of unbalanced foods has decreased somewhat: in 2015, 89.7 percent of products were questionable.

German Minister of Agriculture Julia Klockner (CDU) relies on the voluntary commitment of companies, it announced to “Tagspiegel”. For example, the sugar content of yogurt and baby pot preparations has already been reduced by a fifth, and sodas now contain about a third less sugar. With the reduction strategy by the minister, the end products should generally become healthier.