One of the speakers at the conference being held this week, Dr Andrew Rowland, talked about an 11-year-old patient, who weighed 13 stone five pounds and could not walk from the waiting room to the consulting room without being out of breath.
"Young children are being bombarded with advertisements for food that is damaging their health. They may not at this stage have developed the reasoning capabilities to recognise the adverse effects this food is having on their health," Rowland said.
Another doctor said that he could advise people about what food to eat, but there was no guarantee that they would listen to his advice. "How good do I look next to Gary Lineker telling them to eat crisps?" Keith Brent, a paediatrician from Northampton, asked.
However, another speaker, Dr Norman Vetter, said that a pre-watershed ban would be unworkable because kids are up at all times of the day and night.
Last month, the BMA said that junk food manufacturers should be banned from targeting unhealthy foods at children and called on the government to ban television advertising of junk foods before the watershed on all channels aimed at children.
At the conference yesterday, delegates were told that the food industry spent 拢300m promoting what it dubbed unhealthy food in 1999, and that 99% of food advertising during children's TV was for fatty and sugary foods.
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