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Restaurants slammed for ‘hardline stance’ against healthy options

by Barbados Today
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Major fast-food restaurants are reluctant to cooperate with health and medical authorities in the drive to get Barbadians to eat healthily and operators have outright refused to pivot to any healthier options, officials said Wednesday.

The officials now suggest it’s time for policymakers to step in, saying that education alone is insufficient to change tastes and stem their impact.

Even as they continue to push for stronger nutritional benefits to be included in local meals as the epidemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs sky rockets, the officials expressed frustration with the restaurants’ resistance.

The development was revealed to journalists during a panel discussion on Building Back Better: Implementing School Food Nutrition Policy in Barbados Post-COVID at a media training workshop hosted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Barbados (HSFB) Inc.

No firms were identified but Senior Education Officer with responsibility for Food and Nutrition in the Ministry of Education, Hedda Phillips-Boyce, made clear that though efforts were made in the past to reach a middle ground with several large fast-food operators in order to create healthier choices for consumers, little to know cooperation was received.

“About two years ago, the Ministry of Health had invited the directors of fast food companies to have a meeting, because of our concern with our student choices and their marketing in our schools. Only one company sent a representative… so yes we have tried, but we did not make any impact, she said.

Senior Medical Officer Dr Arthur Phillips backed up Philips-Boyce’s comments. Most fast food outlets took a hardline stance against offering healthier choices, he said, suggesting the National School Food Nutrition Policy is needed now more than ever, to be implemented to keep producers in check and protect future generations.

Dr Phillips told journalists: “There has been a series of efforts, we can always do more and we can always do better, but there have been a series of efforts. The industry has tended not to engage, or engage in a very peripheral way or engage in a bargaining way. I think for too long we have sort of tiptoed around the issues, or we just accepted the industry is just not playing ball.

“The good thing though, is that one of the fears of the industry is that they will lose, particularly that they will individually lose, as in if I reformulate and my stuff does not taste as good, then people will leave my stuff for those that have not been reformulated. Having government intervention and having structure, like talking about reducing the amount of grams of sugar in sweetened beverages, if everybody is mandated to reduce over a period of time, then there is no unfair advantage.”

Dr Philips also declared as a failed strategy the notion of using education alone to help stem the rising tide of NCDs. He maintained that if any true change is to be seen in the diet of Barbadians, mandated policy and other corrective solutions will be required.

He said: “The industry tends to say, and policymakers buy into this idea, of just educating the children or parents, and everything will be fine.

“We have been trying that for more than 30 years, it does not work. The built environment and marketing are clearly more powerful, we protect children because they are not fully developed, they cannot make certain types of decisions. We don’t let them drive, we don’t let them vote, and we protect children.

“We should not be allowing marketing directly to children, and this idea of individual responsibility being applied to children, I think is inappropriate, and we need to be clear in counteracting it when the industry raises it.”  (SB)

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