Day 050 - 10 Nov 94 - Page 17
1 MR. MORRIS: I might be a little bit dodging about here,
2 because there are various outstanding matters. You said
3 something about -----
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If you do dodge about, it is sometimes
6 helpful just to say at the beginning of the question:
7 "Going to another point", so that the witness is not
8 trying to associate the next question with the last one.
9
10 MR. MORRIS: Yes.
11
12 (To the witness) A different point, although it does jump
13 into mind after that: you said something about difficult
14 feeders, that advertising can play a role in encouraging
15 children who might not want to eat to be attracted to
16 certain foods?
17 A. I said something to that effect, yes.
18
19 Q. Would you agree with that last statement?
20 A. It might be, it might be helpful, yes.
21
22 Q. How would advertising help, in your opinion, people that
23 had problems with their eating; in what way would it help
24 -- children, I am talking about?
25 A. I am not sure about "problems with their eating", if
26 they were medical or health problems. I do not think I am
27 addressing that.
28
29 But may I give one example of a commercial that I saw the
30 other day for milk; and it showed two small boys aged seven
31 or eight, that sort of age, and one of them was drinking
32 milk. The other one said: "Ugh, milk. Why are you doing
33 that?" The answer given was: "Well, Ian Rush, the
34 Liverpool footballer" -- these were Liverpool boys -- "Ian
35 Rush says if I drink a lot of milk I will grow up fit to
36 play football for Liverpool." So they both grab milk and
37 drink it.
38
39 That is a small, light-hearted example of how an
40 unreasonable antipathy to milk, which is what you might
41 think children sometimes have, could be improved, overcome
42 a little or influenced a little through an advertisement.
43 This was a very popular advertisement; and the statistics
44 I have seen suggested that milk consumption among children
45 of that age did rise quite substantially in the weeks after
46 that commercial was shown.
47
48 That is not somebody who has eating problems, but it is an
49 example of how an advertisement can suggest to a child
50 something which may be a good thing and, therefore, help
51 them in that respect.
52
53 Q. So does it therefore mean that it is the healthfulness of
54 the product that is important; they would be encouraging
55 children to drink milk, which is healthful; if the same
56 thing was used to get people to eat chocolate bars, that
57 would not be healthful?
58 A. It would neither be healthful nor unhealthful. It
59 would depend how many they ate. I think more relevant is
60 the idea that children may have a very limited idea of the
