Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles

The growing public awareness of lifestyle risks associated with children's consumer empowerment is at the heart of this book which uses a comparative news analysis to compare the discursive politics surrounding the 'globesity pandemic' in North America and the UK. Focusing on the role that epidemiol [...]
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The growing public awareness of lifestyle risks associated with children's consumer empowerment is at the heart of this book which uses a comparative news analysis to compare the discursive politics surrounding the 'globesity pandemic' in North America and the UK. Focusing on the role that epidemiological advocacy played in galvanizing moral panic about the weight gain in child populations, this study examines how this medicalization of lifestyle choices re-ignited deeply held public debates about children's commercial TV and its disturbance of patterns of domestic consumption. The globesity pandemic therefore renewed one of the most profound challenges to neo-liberalism that exists -- the vulnerable child consumer. Exploring empirically children's special status as 'vulnerable' consumers, this book provides new evidence of both the systemic bias created by food marketing in the USA and the UK, as well as the processes through which marketing comes to influence children's discretionary choices in the context of branding and parental mitigation of lifestyle risk taking.