(NaturalNews) British social workers took a toddler into custody after his parents refused to feed him junk food.
Paul and Lisa Hessey of Bolsover, England, took their two-year-old son Zak to a doctor when he began refusing to eat his mother's cooking and dropped to 17 pounds.
"I thought I was ... going to the best people for advice when Zak began to lose weight," his mother said. "Instead they basically accused me of neglecting him and implied it was all my fault."
Doctors advised Zak's parents to feed him junk food in order to stem his weight loss. His parents, firm believers in healthy eating, refused.
"I have four other children and they are perfectly healthy, it was just that Zak was refusing food for some reason," his mother said. "They said I should just feed Zak chocolate, cakes and junk food just to get calories into him. But I objected, saying that was only a short-term answer and not a proper solution."
The Hesseys were then informed that social services was going to take Zak into custody.
"They kept saying, 'If you love Zak and you want the best for him then you'll agree to this,' Lisa Hessey said." They said we had been negative about eating."
According to Mrs. Hessey, the social workers also said, "You have legal rights but be warned if you oppose this we will go straight to court and have all your parental rights taken away."
Intimidated, the Hesseys did not object. They were barred from seeing their son until they hired a lawyer and secured one three-hour accompanied visit per day. After four weeks of battling in court, the Hesseys won the return of their son. In spite of being fed junk food while in state custody, Zak had gained only one pound.
"The government and doctors are always drumming into parents the importance of healthy eating -- yet they were telling us to feed Zak all the wrong things," Mrs. Hessey said. "That is obviously what they were doing when he was in foster care so now it is hard to get him to eat anything else."
Sources for this story include: www.dailymail.co.uk.
Showing posts with label junk food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label junk food. Show all posts
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Online Advertising Easily Influences Teens to Eat More Junk Food
(NaturalNews) Teenagers are strongly affected by Internet marketing in a way that has yet to be addressed by scientific research or government regulation, a group of scientists has warned in a review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
"As the media marketplace continues its rapid transformation, becoming a ubiquitous presence in young people's lives, further academic research is needed to understand fully the nature, scope, and extent of interactive advertising's impact on youth," the researchers wrote.
According to the paper, the United States still regulates advertising to children and teenagers based on studies conducted in the 1970s on how television influences young minds. The authors said that the Internet is a fundamentally different medium than television, however.
"In the Internet era, children and teens are not passive viewers; they are active participants and content creators in an interactive digital environment that pervades their personal and social lives," they wrote.
Advertisers have specifically targeted teenagers for Internet marketing, particularly of food and drink. Teenagers are significantly more impulsive in their purchasing than younger children or older adults, and spend an average of $46 online each month. They are significantly more likely to participate in online marketing campaigns than other age groups.
Self-imposed regulations by junk food and other manufacturers fall far short of what is needed, researchers said. They criticized these initiatives, in part, for being "narrowly focused" on children younger than 12.
"Although this model may have been appropriate when television was the primary advertising medium, it has limited utility for addressing the changing media and marketing landscape. Nor does it provide guidance for understanding the role of adolescents in the digital marketplace," the scientists wrote.
The federal government recently made moves to address junk food marketing to teenagers when it created the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children. The mandate of this group includes all children through the age of 17.
Sources for this story include: www.foodnavigator-usa.com.
"As the media marketplace continues its rapid transformation, becoming a ubiquitous presence in young people's lives, further academic research is needed to understand fully the nature, scope, and extent of interactive advertising's impact on youth," the researchers wrote.
According to the paper, the United States still regulates advertising to children and teenagers based on studies conducted in the 1970s on how television influences young minds. The authors said that the Internet is a fundamentally different medium than television, however.
"In the Internet era, children and teens are not passive viewers; they are active participants and content creators in an interactive digital environment that pervades their personal and social lives," they wrote.
Advertisers have specifically targeted teenagers for Internet marketing, particularly of food and drink. Teenagers are significantly more impulsive in their purchasing than younger children or older adults, and spend an average of $46 online each month. They are significantly more likely to participate in online marketing campaigns than other age groups.
Self-imposed regulations by junk food and other manufacturers fall far short of what is needed, researchers said. They criticized these initiatives, in part, for being "narrowly focused" on children younger than 12.
"Although this model may have been appropriate when television was the primary advertising medium, it has limited utility for addressing the changing media and marketing landscape. Nor does it provide guidance for understanding the role of adolescents in the digital marketplace," the scientists wrote.
The federal government recently made moves to address junk food marketing to teenagers when it created the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children. The mandate of this group includes all children through the age of 17.
Sources for this story include: www.foodnavigator-usa.com.
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