Photo of children I often joke that corporations want to hurt puppies, kittens, or children for profits. Unfortunately, a recent press release by the National Grocers Association (NGA) makes this a little less funny by actually arguing that profits should be valued over children's health. The press release responds to an inter-agency request for comments regarding marketing food to children.

The inter-agency report makes a small number of recommendations that boil down to a) promoting healthier food, b) limiting marketing of unhealthy food, and c) applying these recommendations to the most frequently marketed categories and most commonly used marketing tactics. There is nothing substantially controversial in the proposal.

The NGA, however, finds this to be highly unreasonable. They barely attempt to disguise their profit motivation over the health of the nation's children:

N.G.A.'s members are proud to offer products that are low fat, low calorie, low sugar, gluten free and locally grown produce. However, Working Group's recommendations go too far.

And, how might you ask, do they go too far?

The "voluntary" Proposed Principles require the reformulation of a widerange of products and limit the marketing of national and private brand label products. N.G.A., food retailers, food wholesalers and manufacturers have had a lot of recent experience with "voluntary principles," [that] quickly became government mandates that were costly and burdensome to independent retailers and wholesalers.

In other words, being responsible corporate citizens that protect our nation's children costs too much money. Such recommendations are unnecessary says the NGA president "at a time when the food industry has taken giant steps in providing consumers with nutritional information and healthy food choices."

What are those "giant steps"? An article by Jennifer Harris and colleagues shows that such efforts include targeting children with more than 50% of their products (increasing 5% over two years alone) and an increase of almost 80% in the use of cross-promotions, 70% of which involve character licensing. Of those products targeted at children, only 18% met nutritional standards and, perhaps even worse, those with child marketing policies increased their marketing without improving the nutritional standards of their products.

These are the "giant steps" that don't disrupt the bottom line. It's just unfortunate that they seem to squash the health of our nation's children.