Junk food ads on buses didn’t make your kids fat - you did | Caleb Bond

If your children are eating garbage, it’s not the fault of Big Junk Food – it’s yours, writes Caleb Bond.

Sometimes someone comes up with a solution to a problem and it’s so simple that you can’t believe anyone didn’t think of it before.

As it happens, someone has had one of those moments when it comes to obesity.

Yes, the state government has instantaneously shrunk our waistlines by banning ham sandwiches from being shown on buses, trains and trams – if it’s part of an advertisement for a specific processed meat product.

Why didn’t I think of that one?

Probably because it’s ridiculous and it won’t turn a single overweight person into a gym junkie, but let’s do it anyway because it’s better to look like you’re doing something than admit you don’t know what to do.

Ham sandwiches, if part of processed meat ads, will be given the flick from July 1.

Product ads for chocolate, lollies, other confectionary, desserts, ice creams, soft drinks and chips will all be banned too on public transport.

South Australian Health Minister Chris Picton wants someone to think of the children. Picture: Kelly Barnes

Presumably South Australian icons Vili’s and Balfours will be prevented from peddling their wares too, what with all that unhealthy pastry.

So now you can’t advertise the two greatest threats to public health – cigarettes and ham sandwiches. Perfect.

Why can we not be treated like adults and trusted to make up our own minds?

If someone is so hooked on chocolate that they can’t possibly drive past a bus without being compelled to pull into the next servo and satiate their addiction, then they have much bigger problems than advertising.

The nanny state doesn’t trust you to make your own decisions.

Worse than that, they don’t even trust you to look at a bag of chips for fear you might eat it.

Something tells me this won’t slow the sale of chips or lollies or ham sandwiches.

We’re a nation of overweight and obese people and ads on buses have precious little to do with it.

Australians are obese because they don’t take the time to eat properly or exercise enough.

And I’m as guilty as anyone – I power through vast quantities of red wine, gin, whisky, Coke Zero and blue cheese every week and I’m probably 5kg over what I’d like to be (though not overweight) but I enjoy doing it and that’s my prerogative.

We live vastly more sedentary lifestyles than we did a century ago, with much incidental exercise and physical labour replaced by machines.

But, according to Health Minister Chris Picton, this isn’t about the adults – it’s about the impressionable kiddies being groomed into a lifetime of bad habits because they saw a jube on the side of a tram.

Except it is about the adults, because the kids aren’t feeding themselves.

But the cries come that children see ads for chips and then they pester their parents for chips until they relent.

McDonald’s advertising on a bus in Adelaide. Picture: Matt Loxton

A Hungry Jacks advertising on an Adelaide bus. Picture: Matt Loxton

By that logic they should be locked behind grey cabinet doors like cigarettes because seeing them in the supermarket would have much the same effect.

How about telling kids to be quiet and eat what they’re given?

It’s not Daddy Government’s job to parent your children for you.

If your children are eating garbage, it’s not the fault of Big Junk Food – it’s yours.

I ate my fair share of chips and lollies and other crap as a kid but, when I started my cadetship at The Advertiser aged 17, I was still only 55kg.

Unlike many children today, I wasn’t raised by an electronic screen.

Yank the little ones off the iPad and send them down to the local park to kick the footy around and burn off some calories.

Personal responsibility seems to be an increasingly foreign concept.

Originally published as Junk food ads on buses didn’t make your kids fat - you did | Caleb Bond