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“For nearly 50 years, McDonald’s has pumped billions into marketing campaigns targeting our kids – with devastating effects on children’s health.”

Save for Santa Claus, no icon is more recognized by our children than Ronald McDonald. This wouldn’t be so bad if he were bringing them gifts – but in reality he’s hooking them on unhealthy food for a lifetime.

As Judy Grant of Corporate Accountability International once put it, “Just as Joe Camel lured a generation of kids to cigarettes, Ronald McDonald is luring the next to meals that are unhappily high in salt, sugar, and fat.”

Local Action

Last week, local parents and health professionals took concerns about increasing rates of childhood diet related disease and junk food marketing to kids directly to James Lewis, owner of 14 McDonald’s franchises in the New York area.

Area residents delivered over 300 petition signatures at a local McDonald’s, calling on Lewis, given his influence within the corporation, to bring local concerns to McDonald’s executives.

“For nearly 50 years, McDonald’s has pumped billions into marketing campaigns targeting our kids – with devastating effects on children’s health,” said Organizer Jeff Gang of Corporate Accountability International.

“Franchise owners like James Lewis have a critical role to play in compelling the burger giant to stop the predatory marketing of junk food to our kids. Ronald deserves a break...and so do we!”

National in Scope

Similar events are occurring in Portland, OR, Burlington, VT, and Portsmouth, NH, directed at other franchise owners. The events come on the heels of the 2010 launch of Corporate Accountability International’s national Retire Ronald initiative that has helped reduce the hamburger-happy clown’s prominence in McDonald’s advertising campaigns.

Recent grassroots efforts have also helped set nutritional standards for toy giveaways in kids’ meals in San Francisco.

Junk Food Marketing is Hurting Our Kids

But McDonald’s and its competitors are continuing to find new and innovative means of hooking kids on unhealthy food, like tobacco marketers before them. The Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity recently found that preschoolers and children viewed more McDonald’s television junk food marketing in 2009 than in 2007.

“As an expert, I have no doubt: aggressive junk food marketing to children should be stopped,” said Dr. Dyan Hes of Park Slope Pediatrics. She continued:

The industry knows that this marketing works. Health professionals like myself deal with the consequences of the marketing every day. Children are getting sick with diet-related conditions like diabetes at younger and younger ages. It breaks your heart and it's time for the industry leader to do its part.

Updated USDA guidelines, released this week, call the obesity epidemic "the greatest threat to public health in this century" and link fast food consumption with increased risk of obesity. Studies from a wide range of authorities including the Institutes of Medicine and the National Bureau of Economic Research have found that reducing junk food marketing to kids can have profound impacts on children’s health.

McDonald’s own voluntary marketing code, while ineffectual, also acknowledges the correlation between junk food marketing and children’s health and the need to change course.

What remains is for McDonald’s executives to act.

“As an owner of local stores, James Lewis interacts with parents and children in this community. He sees and understands the consequences of ad campaigns directed at children in ways McDonald’s executives don’t always,” said Nadine Hajjar, a local mother of two. “Today we’re encouraging James Lewis to work with us to be an advocate for local children by taking our concerns to Oak Brook.”

About Corporate Accountability International

For more than 30 years, Corporate Accountability International (formerly INFACT) has run hard-hitting and highly effective campaigns to save lives, protect public health, and preserve the environment. Its campaigns have compelled dramatic changes in corporate conduct, from curbing the life-threatening marketing of infant formula in the developing world to securing strong new global protections against the marketing of tobacco products to children.

To learn more about the organization working to protect our kids, go to: Corporate Accountability International

To view some of the previous posts on the topic, go to:

1. Junk Food Ads are Prevalent on TV Programs for Kids

2. Yale Study: TV Ads Contribute to Obesity in Children

3. Ads Make Junk Food Sound Healthy for Kids

4. Selling to Kids

5. Food Giants Still Marketing Junk Food to Kids

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