-
- Todd A Harper and Gavin Mooney.
- Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), Melbourne, VIC, Australia. tharper@vichealth.vic.gov.au
- Med. J. Aust. 2010 Apr 5;192(7):400-2.
AbstractThe recent interest in health promotion and disease prevention has drawn attention to the role of the alcohol and junk-food industries. Companies supplying, producing, advertising or selling alcohol or junk food (ie, foods with a high content of fat, sugar or salt) do so to generate profits. Even companies marketing "low-carbohydrate" beers, "mild" cigarettes, or "high-fibre" sugary cereals are not primarily concerned about population health, more so increased sales and profits. In a competitive market, it is assumed that consumers make fully informed choices about costs and benefits before purchasing. However, consumers are not being fully informed of the implications of their junk-food and alcohol choices, as advertising of these products carries little information on the health consequences of consumption. We propose that there should be a levy on advertising expenditure for junk food and alcoholic beverages to provide an incentive for industry to promote healthier products. Proceeds of the levy could be used to provide consumers with more complete and balanced information on the healthy and harmful impacts of food and alcohol choices. Our proposal addresses two of the greatest challenges facing Australia's preventable disease epidemic - the imbalance between the promotion of healthier and unhealthy products, and securing funds to empower consumer choice.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*
,_underline_
or**bold**
. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>
and subscript<sub>text</sub>
. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3.
, hyphens-
or asterisks*
. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
- Images can be included with:
![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
- For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)
inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]
to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote.
.