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J Youth Adolescence (2013) 42:147150 DOI 10.1007/s10964-012-9824-1
BOOK REVIEW
Stephen Kline: Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles
Palgrave MacMillan, New York, NY 2011, pp 252, ISBN 978-0-230-53740-8
Erin Madar
Received: 15 September 2012 / Accepted: 18 September 2012 / Published online: 28 September 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
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. Klines 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 inated in popular media. The result has been inammation of a moral panic, in which vulnerable children must be protected from outside inuence 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 re in association with increasing youth obesity.
Identifying child-focused food advertising at the center of the media campaign against the child obesity epidemic, Kline evaluates the inuence of food advertising targeted to children in his own original research. He examines the power of policy on childrens obesity by comparing food advertising and obesity associations in Britain, which banned food advertising targeting children, versus in America, where televised food advertising directed at children is protected by constitutional guarantees. Finally, Kline seeks a deeper
explanation for childrens expanding waistlines, leveraging epidemiological data to examine the effects of not just food marketing but also total television exposure, activity levels, sedentary time and parent authority on childrens obesity.
The breadth of factors implicated in childhood obesity makes pinpointing the actual culprits an imprecise science, and although Kline makes a valiant attempt to evaluate many possible contributors, he offers no magic bullets. He does, however,...