ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evidence for industry advertising and marketing practices that have been used to promote highly processed branded food and beverage products with excessive energy, fat, sugars and sodium (HFSS) to influence dietary patterns and increase the health risks for children and adolescents. It describes a commercial marketing foodscape that has evolved in countries worldwide where governments have supported a permissive public policy environment for private-sector actors to use integrated marketing communications to normalize and create demand for unhealthy HFSS food and beverage products purchased and consumed by young people. The limitations of transnational industry actors’ voluntary commitments and self-regulatory programmes are discussed and compared with best-practice recommendations issued by the United Nations agencies and governments to restrict the marketing of unhealthy HFSS products to children and adolescents. The chapter provides a case study of food marketing policies in the United Kingdom. It also recommends actions for diverse institutional actors to support the principles of healthy and sustainable food systems and how actors involved can be held accountable for policies to promote a commercial foodscape that protects and promotes healthy dietary patterns for young people and meets nutritional targets to ensure healthy lives for all.
