Childhood obesity continues to be a significant concern in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say between 2017 and 2020, nearly a fifth of 2- to 19 year-olds were obese. That totals more than 14 million kids and adolescents.
New research examines policies the U.S. could implement to bring those numbers down. And it doesn’t need to look too far to find them. Latin American countries have successfully implemented warning labels, taxes, advertising restrictions and portion control initiatives.
Lucía Félix Beltrán is a senior policy fellow at the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at UCLA, and one of the authors of the study.
Beltrán joined The Show to talk about how a number of Latin American countries take a pretty different approach to dealing with this problem than we do here in the United States.
Full conversation
LUCÍA FÉLIX BELTRÁN: Absolutely, it was something that resulted from our research, and I personally was really I was really impressed by how different these countries are. I am originally from Mexico actually, so I have observed and experienced what the adoption of these policies has looked like and how these issues are addressed in the U.S. precisely.
Political systems greatly even determined sometimes the adoption of certain policies, and it was something that we concluded and it was clearly observed, for example, in the U.S., it is really clear how states or even subnational governments beginning from counties, cities, states have a larger power than what is observed in the rest of the continent.
The rest of the continent has greater federal governments, hence a lot of these policies were adopted at a national level, which is something extremely challenging to do in the United States. To get a national policy on anything is really, really challenging, while in the rest of the countries that we looked at, for example, the soda tax in Mexico or in Chile, these are national policies, while whatever exists in soda taxation in the US have been cities.
MARK BRODIE: It would seem as though if you're trying to tackle an issue like this, a national approach would be preferable rather than a sort of a patchwork of different cities and different states kind of doing their own thing. Is that what the research finds? Like is that actually true?
BELTRÁN: Not necessarily, we didn't get that much into the political landscape. It was more what we did find was the importance of having multiple actors agree on the solution to the issue.
BRODIE: Was it surprising to you how influential the government is in this? I mean, you often think about, you know, public health officials and, you know, individual consumers and, you know, people making their own decisions, but based on your research, it seems like the government itself at whatever level plays a pretty significant role here as well.
BELTRÁN: Absolutely, it does. And, and as you say, at, at many levels, at even at the city level or at the county level or at the national level, and particularly, and it also depends on the policy we're talking about, for example, we included multiple policies that we discussed. We discussed menu labeling, taxing sugar-sweetened beverages, or restrictions in food advertising, portion control, and all of these, the government will play a different role.
For example, in the case of front of package labeling, whatever labeling we're talking about, it's a regulatory measure. That will be up to the government, 100%. Whereas when we talk about portion control, you have a clearer role played by the industry as well.
And wait, I haven't mentioned that the industry has, of course, like the food industry has not been, has not been pleased with any of these measures. They have taken extreme actions in the U.S. and in the, and in the Latin American countries we looked at.
BRODIE: Well, so you mentioned, for example, that the sugary beverage tax. I wonder if there are other lessons that the U.S. should be taking from some of the Latin American countries that you looked at in terms of approaches that they have taken that seem to be successful in terms of bringing down the rate of childhood obesity in those countries.
BELTRÁN: So one of the, initially I didn't mention this, but initially this report was supposed to be exclusively about the front of package labeling, because just like the sugar tax started to be adopted by multiple countries, not only in Latin America, but in the world, in the past, I don't know, five or six years, we've observed a proliferation of front of package labeling adoption in the rest of the world as well.
So initially we just wanted to look at front of package labeling, but then we realized that wasn't enough, that we had to look at the other policies that had also been adopted. So, in terms of, well, resulting from the front of package labeling discussion that we had. It is challenging to do that in the U.S. Like there's differences, there's political differences such as the First Amendment, for example, that the industry usually appeals to that does not exist in other places in the world.
BRODIE: When you talk about front of package labeling, is that in some ways like not saying things are healthy if in fact they're not or being maybe a little more strict about what can be labeled organic, things like that. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
BELTRÁN: So that's what we suggest, we can't have, so the front of package labeling as it is discussed in the policy realm is having, we have it in the report like in Latin America we have these hexagons and in other European countries as well just having signs of how healthy something is, is what has been adopted. We do not think that's as feasible in the U.S. It is really challenging, so at least having more clarity regarding what is healthy and how you advertise these products is definitely helpful for consumers.
BRODIE: What about marketing and advertising? My understanding is based on your report that there are some different rules about that in other countries relative to the U.S.
BELTRÁN: Yeah, so that's one that we did find that could be adopted. So for example, in the, in Mexico since 2014, network and cable TV cannot show advertisement to our children on junk food between 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on weekdays, and it cannot show it during the day on weekends. So restricting at least direct to consumer advertising could help. And definitely something that has changed in, in, in these countries in Latin America is that you no longer find cartoons that are, you know, how in cereal boxes in the ‘80s you would have cartoons advertising for these products. You can't have that anymore here. I can't, I mean in Latin America.
BRODIE: What you're describing sounds a lot like what happened to the tobacco industry, right, whether they're not allowed to advertise on TV, there are restrictions on where other kinds of advertisements can be. Do you think it's, it's realistic? Is it feasible to do that in the U.S., do you think, for junk food for kids?
BELTRÁN: I think it is realistic and it should be advocated for.
BRODIE: So, how optimistic are you after doing this research and seeing that there are some things that work in some places, how optimistic are you that the U.S. can get its childhood obesity problem under control?
BELTRÁN: I'm torn. It looks very challenging politically, but it's not impossible. My optimism relies on local governments doing a lot of the work, to be honest, more so than the federal government.
