From Bangladesh to Britain, blanket exposure to promotional material for unhealthy foods is encouraging children to eat badly, new research claims

Nepalese schoolgirl Prasiddhika Shrestha is holding up a video camera at her aunt’s house, filming her cousins as they devour crisps, corn puffs, soda and dalmoth, a traditional lentil-based snack.

“What is it that you like eating most?” she asks them. “Lay’s chips and Coke,” says Diwani, who drinks between one and two litres of soft drink every day. Rihana includes a pack of Kurkure corn puffs in her daily diet.

Prasiddhika is among 100 schoolchildren in seven countries asked by researchers from University College London to film themselves and the food they eat for a study about the exposure of children to unhealthy diets.

Kiran Dahal, a Nepalese schoolboy, is filming in his school’s canteen, where children are scrambling over each other to buy junk food at lunchtime. “I bought two [corn puffs], a packet of dalmoth, pakoda [fried snack], chewing gum and a packet of instant noodles,” he says, showing them to the camera one by one.

Play Video 0:48 Kiran Dahal's video food diary

Pupils Laxmi and Nima eat six packs of instant noodles between them each day. “We see Coke on TV during races and football matches. We also see instant noodles on advertisements,” they say.

An unhealthy diet is a major cause of “non-communicable diseases” such as heart diseases, cancer, diabetes and strokes. Such diseases accounted for 66% of deaths in Nepal in 2017. A report this year by the UN’s children agency, Unicef, found that 43% of Nepalese children are either stunted or overweight.

“The situation regarding junk food is very worrisome in Nepal,” says Atul Upadhyay of the global health organisation Helen Keller International, who is featured in UCL’s Nepal film study, produced in collaboration with the Kathmandu-based centre for research on environment, health and population activities. “Children are eating more unhealthy food than they are eating healthy food.”

Professor Sarah Hawkes, director of UCL’s centre for gender and global health, and the lead researcher behind the project, says the footage collected by children in Nepal was similar to those filmed in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tunisia, Vietnam and the UK.

“All children we worked with shared the common experience of pervasive, powerful and, it seems, often unregulated advertising and promotion,” she says.

“The children’s footage vividly communicates that, once they step outside schools, they, and their parents, have very little control over what they see and experience, what is on their local high street, or what is going into the food they purchase there.”

Play Video 1:40 Schoolchildren Laxmi and Nima make a video food diary

Alongside the films, researchers have studied how each country has implemented World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations that include ways to prevent and control non-communicable diseases at national level.

In Nepal’s case, researchers said, policies fell short. There is no tax on sugary drinks and no ban on trans fats in the food chain.

None of the seven countries subsidised healthy foods, the findings showed.

No country has taken up the WHO recommendation to ban trans fats in the food chain. Some progress has been made in Tunisia, where a law was passed in 2017 to tax sugar-sweetened drinks.

Globally, obesity and diabetes are rising among young people. The UNHCR, the refugee agency, warned in October that at least one in three children under five are either undernourished or overweight, and one in two lack essential vitamins and nutrients. In south Asia, 50% of children are undernourished or overweight. From 2000 to 2016, the number of overweight children aged five to 19 has doubled, from one in 10 to one in five.

Recent studies published in the Lancet medical journal showed that more than a third of low- and middle-income countries are affected by the double burden of malnutrition, meaning that children not having enough food in poor countries are also in danger of obesity, or eating too many empty calories in the form of junk food.

“Children all over the world are facing major challenges to eat healthily – they are more surrounded by advertising and by opportunities to eat ‘junk’ [processed] food than any previous generation,” says Dr Kent Buse, co-investigator on the study, who complains that government responses have not kept pace with fast-changing food environments.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A group of British school students eat lunch on the steps of the National Gallery in London, England. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

“The prevalence of poor dental health is increasing alongside rises in consumption of sugar, including in sugary drinks,” adds Hawkes. “The sugary drinks industry is spending vast amounts of money advertising to populations in low- and middle-income countries. Coca-Cola plans to spend $12bn on marketing in Africa by 2020.”

Anna Purdie, programme manager at UCL centre for gender and global health, says there is a growing global crisis and, in many countries, a policy vacuum on tackling it.

“The films showed us incredibly high levels of unhealthy food consumption and pervasive advertising – highlighting that living environments across the globe are not ‘fit for purpose’ when it comes to healthy diets. They make it increasingly difficult for young people to eat well and increasingly easy to eat badly,” she says.

Purdie says there were a number of obstacles to tackling the problem, including the influence manufacturers and corporations wield over politicians, the lack of interest in non-communicable diseases from donors, and politicians’ fears about negative public reactions to regulation. Salt and sugar also remain embedded in traditional dishes.

“The environments around us are becoming increasingly unhealthy, while narratives remain heavily anchored on the failure of the individual, rather than the failure of our environments,” Purdie says.

“It is far too easy to eat badly, and far too difficult to eat well. Responsibility for this does not just lie with individuals. Rigorous policy changes will be required … but this means going up against powerful and wealthy corporations and often governments who are not interested in seeing this change.”