Stephen Kline: Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles

Steven Kline debunks the myths and accusations tethering food marketing campaigns to child obesity, exploring real statistics and contributors in Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles. Kline’s multidisciplinary approach begins by contextualizing the political and social culture in which the idea of the global obesity epidemic (“globesity”) arose, proffering the statistical realities of overweight and obese children and highlighting how these facts have been skewed and inflated in popular media. The result has been inflammation of a moral panic, in which vulnerable children must be protected from outside influence because they are not capable of making rational and informed decisions in the consumer society. It certainly is true that obesity and its many life-limiting complications has increased among children and even more so in adolescents, particularly since the 1980s (see Sarwer and Dilks 2012). It also is true that publication of these data and studies has had the desired effect of creating public concern. But, these developments also have led the popular media to seek a scapegoat. Food advertising directed at children has come under fire in association with increasing youth obesity. …