The government should ban eating and drinking on public transport to tackle childhood obesity, says Dame Sally Davies in her final report as outgoing Chief Medical Officer for England.
Davies says the government needs to put children’s health before company profits and recommended banning the advertisement or promotion of junk food anywhere (adverts on children’s TV are already banned from encouraging poor diets or unhealthy lifestyles), as well as eating or drinking on buses and trains.
Her suggestion had the exceptions of drinking fresh water, breastfeeding, or eating and drinking because you have a medical condition that requires you to do so, like diabetes.Related... Children's Weight Is A Difficult Issue For Parents To Address: How To Handle It Sensitively Given a third of all primary school children are classified as overweight or obese, and the government has promised to halve childhood obesity figures by 2030, clearly steps need to be taken – but is this the right one? We asked HuffPost
UK readers, both parents and non-parents, what they thought of the proposals.
Parents largely thought it was a bad idea, and that it was overlooking solutions such as encouraging physical activity or moving fast food temptations away from children.The way to tackle obesity is to get kids out of the classroom and doing more physical activity and for parents to ditch screens and get outdoors with their kids. Banning eating is crazy and impossible to
police surely?— MommyMaynes (@gail_maynes) October 10, 2019🤣🤣🤣 wow! Do people have no hold of general knowledge these days?! Childhood obesity can be tackled if affordable sports classes can be provided! Also the fact that fast food shops are surrounding schools nowadays!— Sophie Kathir (@SophieKathir) October 10, 2019How on earth?! A lot of children don’t want to play out and do psychical activities anymore. They’d much rather play consoles, or on tablets. They should be out running about more instead of spending their childhoods on technology parents should be making sure of this! 😡— Francheska🌹 (@FrancheskaJukes) October 10, 2019Some parents also highlighted the hypocrisy of children being able to eat or snack in private vehicles, versus those who travel on public transport. I think it’s missing several points by several miles. Will the little darlings also be banned from eating in Mummy’s Range Rover 🤔— Aruna Stannard (@aruna_stannard) October 10, 2019Non-parents were also worried about the impact it would have, especially concerning adults who need to eat on transport if they are working antisocial hours, or are on a long journey.
And some people raised the question: how would this be enforced and by whom? We do need to do more to tackle obesity, especially in children, but This isn’t the way. How will it be enforced? Will people be reporting kids for snacking? Shouldn’t adults be given agency to eat what they want, when they want?— Resham Kotecha (@ReshamKotecha) October 10, 2019An exception for health reasons (eg diabetes) was part of the proposal. Not sure how you would enforce that - demand doctor's notes?— Dr Jim Baker (@jsbaker750) October 10, 2019It's also completely unenforceable— leggo (@LachlanEggo) October 10, 2019Others were worried about the impact it would have on food businesses near transport hubs.There’s also retailers in and around public transport stations that would suffer 🤷♂️— James Theis (@Jeroboam74) October 10, 2019Presumably a lot of the Upper Crusts, McDonald's, pasty places etc. in major railway stations would end up closing as a result, as well as the little coffee shops at other stations. Not great for the
economy (as well as being utterly impossible to enforce)— GW ❄️🌨️🖕🏻🐦🇪🇺 no to Dyson & Weatherspoons (@Cosmic_Kakapo) October 10, 2019Ans some cited examples of where similar policies had failed in other places.All of the points you raise are valid. I think there would be a huge backlash if they tried to stop people from eating on the
New York City subway.A few years ago, there was a huge fight because
Washington, DC Metro security attested a 12 year old girl for eating a French fry.— LarryKellogg (@LarryKellogg) October 10, 2019Put simply, people were not impressed.Never heard such nonsense— KLT (@KLT24401383) October 10, 2019It's the politics of the pub bore— Mark "Collapsible Truncheon" Thompson (@MarkReckons) October 10, 2019I don't think shes thought this through.........— sue#NHSLove (@SueSuezep) October 10, 2019What do you think of banning food and drink on public transport? Get involved in the conversation on Twitter. Related... First Came The 'Sugar Tax', Now Campaigners Want A 'Calorie Levy' Diabetes Symptoms: How To Spot Type 2 In Children One In Five UK Children In 'Devastating' Persistent Poverty, Study Finds