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Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

Charlie can’t wait for the first of July. It’s five years 3 months and two days since his last pint of Old Brewery Bitter. He’s not been in prison or exile. Nor has he signed the pledge. He’s just got old and little frail. And with the advancing years his childhood asthma returned, tightening his chest remorselessly. He’s able to manage alright in the fresh air, or his own home, but the smoke in the King’s Head has become unmanageable. 

He had his first (legal) pint there on his 18 birthday. But after 62 years – minus the five he spent in North Africa – he’s had to pack it in. He can still taste the hops if he closes his eyes. In just a few weeks he’d be able to taste them again - for real.

"he’s noticed his football has suffered from the smoke"

It will probably be Mike who pours his much anticipated pint for him. He’s a student nurse at Newport Uni, just down the road, but does four shifts a week at the King’s to help fend off his mounting debts. Been doing it for nearly three years now, and he’s noticed his football has suffered from the unwanted – but unavoidable - second hand smoke. The regulars who sit at the bar are selflessly devoted to sharing their spare carcinogens with him. 

More alarmingly he is also well aware that the atmosphere isn’t just capable of lowering his game; his first year epidemiology course told him that its also lethal. Somewhere in England, one of his fellow bar keepers dies from it every week. But there’s not a lot he can do about it; he needs the money. And the sneering suggestion that he should get a job elsewhere is as useless as it is insulting. 

The man from the Brewery has tried to reassure him that the new ventilator will sort the problem, but Mike isn’t convinced. It does make the place look better; getting rid of the visible parts of the smoke. But his nursing course has also taught him that it’s the unseen bits – which the fans can’t touch - that really do the damage. It’s like protecting a miner by taking away his canary. In any case, what good is sucking the muck out if there’s a bevy of smokers busily puffing it back in. You wouldn’t try to empty the bath with the taps still running. 

Trudy, Mike’s girlfriend, is also counting the days. She likes to go down to King’s and have a drink with him as he finishes his shift; then they can walk home together. But the smoke is a pain: a hair wash and complete change of clothing every time. Oh for the day when a quiet drink doesn’t turn you into a kipper. 

"the boss wouldn’t have dared go completely smokefree on his own" 

Even the boss is getting excited. He sees real opportunities in winning back old customers – Charlie isn’t the only reluctant absentee – and getting new ones. He’s not big enough to have separate rooms and wouldn’t have dared go completely smokefree on his own. But now the Government is taking the pain, and he can think about catering, may be getting a coffee machine and families are a possibility.   

Some of the regulars, though, are unhappy. They feel persecuted, and mutter about bans, civil liberties and this being a free country. 

Well they are right; this is a free country. Charlie’s five years in North Africa helped see to that. And it will be that bit freer come the first of July, not least for Charlie. Cheers.

Further reading

• Smoking cigarettes - even today, there are people who argue about the risks of tobacco - it's little wonder it took 400 years to get conclusive evidence of the dangers.
• Why do people smoke? - even many people who are fully aware of the health risks involved still enjoy lighting up.
• Cigarettes - find out what lies inside every packet.
• Will the smoking ban kill bingo halls? - The Money Programme investigates.
• Join the discussion - do you think the ban should be stopped to help business?
• Institute for Social Marketing
• Social Marketing: Why should the devil have all the best tunes? by Gerard Hastings, published by Butterworth Heinemann
• 'Understanding adolescent beliefs and intention to smoke: the effect of antismoking information' by Nina Michaelidou, Haider Ali and Sally Dibb, presented at Advances in Consumer Research Conference, Sydney, July 2006

About the author

Professor Gerard Hastings is Director of the Institute of Social Marketing (ISM), a joint venture between the University of Stirling and the Open University. The Institute conducts research into social marketing campaigns that seek to change the behaviours of individuals and society.

Subscribe to Gerard Hastings's posts

 

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

I was struck by the claim that one in five parents in the Money Programme ‘Cost of Kids’ survey admitted to buying new gadgets after pressure from their children, with much of the resulting expenditure ending up on credit cards. The example was consumer electronics companies recruiting our kids to get us to buy gadgets that we don’t need at prices we can’t afford, and only they know how to work. But more worrying is the evidence that pester power, or the ‘nag factor’ as it’s known in America, could be costing us more than money. By encouraging them to ask for the wrong kind of food and drink it’s costing some of our children their health.

From the forum - "the trick to keeping costs down is to think differently and keep things natural"

Marketing first woke up to children in the middle of the 20th century, particularly their power to influence adult purchasing. It began to aim products directly at them rather than having them make do with modified versions of adult products. In many ways this has been a good thing. Taking account of children’s needs in designing products such as holidays, cars or clothing makes a lot of sense. But in other areas, such as fizzy drinks, pre-sweetened cereals and fast food, the effect has been to promote fun and taste well beyond any sense of nutritional value. The vast majority of the food advertising seen by children is for such high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) foods. Any parent who wants to do the best for their children’s dietary habits has a struggle on their hands as a result.

Advertisers deny deliberately setting parents at odds with their children. Industry codes of practice explicitly forbid such tactics, and pundits argue that pestering has much more to do with age than ads. But there is plenty of evidence from consumer research that parents are uncomfortably aware of ceding to demands stimulated by child-directed advertising. One recent study in Sweden revealed that parents actively avoided supermarket shopping accompanied by their children because of the stress it caused. And a widely-used UK market research report on marketing to children underlines the importance of ‘influenced purchasing’.

Opponents in the pester power debate are not shy of throwing contradictory research findings at each other to support their respective positions. But how good is the evidence, and which way does it point? To answer this question OU Business School and our partners in the Institute of Social Marketing recently reviewed a selection of key research articles evaluating the effect of food promotion on children’s attempts to influence purchasing by adults. We only looked at studies meeting strict quality and relevance criteria. They covered children in different parts of the world (US, UK, Saudi Arabia and India), and used a variety of methodologies. Yet they all concurred that food promotion does indeed stimulate demands from children for HFSS foods, increasing conflict in the supermarket aisles and leading in many cases to exasperated expenditure on less healthy products.

The food advertising industry, pointing to its record of self-regulation in the UK, claims that tightening further the rules on advertising to children is disproportionate. It argues that advertising is only one of a number of factors guiding what children want to eat, and that its effect is negligible compared to, say, the influence of parents, schools or peers. But even if advertising on its own only accounted for 2% of the variation in children’s food choice and consequent obesity (as has been suggested by some researchers), the cumulative effect will leave a significant number with health problems.

Against this kind of controversy, Ofcom, the UK telecommunications regulator, has spent a year consulting on a number of different options to tighten up regulation. On 22nd February 2007 it issued new rules banning HFSS food ads from programming likely to be popular with under 16s by the end of the year. While this looks like good news for any harassed parents out there, it has been greeted with dismay by health campaigners for not going far enough (many wanted a total ban on such ads pre 9pm). Industry bodies are not happy either, criticising the definitional criteria for HFSS foods as inconsistent. Furthermore, Ofcom’s announcement included a commitment to reviewing the effectiveness and scope of the new arrangements in autumn 2008, which seems rather early in the day to be looking for conclusive results. You may be sure that this controversy will not be over till the, er, fat lady sings.

Further reading

• The price of parenthood – having children brings many changes
• Join the discussion – how does the cost of children affect your view of having kids?
• The cost of kids – the Money Programme investigates the rising price of parenthood 
• ‘Food Advertising, Pester Power, and Its Effects’ in International Journal of Advertising, November 2006
• Television Advertising of Food and Drink Products to Children published by Ofcom

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.

Subscribe to Terry O'Sullivan's posts

 

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

Millions of people throughout the world don't get enough to eat. Not surprisingly, their health suffers. We need food for growing, repairing ourselves, keeping all our body systems ticking over properly, and reproducing. We also need food for activity – even sitting thinking uses energy, and physical work, of course, uses a lot more. Without adequate food intake, all these things suffer.

But here in the developed world, very few of us go to bed hungry on a regular basis. We have plenty to eat, and generally live longer than our counterparts in the developing world. Of course, we do get ill, but the immediate cause isn't usually lack of food.

Why, then, is there currently such an obsession with trying to improve our health and performance with specific dietary components? If we are already healthy by all normal measures, why do we want to be healthier – how could we tell, and what benefits might it bring us? And, more importantly, what makes us believe that a particular supplement will do the trick for us?

The evidence that food supplements improve health is patchy to say the least. Yes, vitamin C is important for health – without it we would get scurvy, and there is some evidence that moderate doses allow us to recover from colds more quickly. But that's a long way from proving that massive doses can prevent colds, as is sometimes claimed.

And there is, relatively, a lot of research on vitamin C, including the 'gold standard' of clinical trials. In many cases the trials just haven't been done and even when they have, there's no justification for mentally extending the conclusions to areas the trials were never designed to cover. Take, for example, the 'bioactive' probiotic drinks and yoghurts available in a supermarket near you.

Laboratory studies and some animal tests have shown that these drinks may indeed improve colon function and digestive health, if the microbes they contain survive long enough to get to the colon, and if they remain there for long enough to have an effect. And we don't really know if this happens - many researchers believe that you would have to drink as much as 5 litres a day of the probiotic to see any effect!

There's no evidence that fish oil can help you pass exams

Also in the news recently has been the story from Durham of giving children studying for their GCSEs a daily dose of fish oil. Everybody knows that fish oil is good for you, so what's the problem? Well, there's some evidence that fish oil can boost your immune system, but none at all that it can help you to pass exams.

There's an opportunity here for a proper trial: give some students fish oil, and to a matched group give a placebo, and see which group scores the better. But this isn't being done, so we will never know whether the fish oil helped or hindered. And that's the point about many of the claims being made: in many cases, the most you can say is that they will probably do you no harm. Personally, I'll go for a balanced diet every time.

Further reading

The fish oil files – The Guardian's Ben Goldacre on the Durham trials
Probiotics research published by the Food Standards Agency
The Vitamin C Myth National Public Radio's Morning Edition audio report on the gap between the claims for Vitamin C and the evidence
Human Nutrition – a Health Perspective by Mary E. Barasi
Understanding Human Nutrition – Open University short course perfect if you are interested in your own and your family’s diet, or if you are involved in the nutrition and health of others